Simon Pearson - minor9th.com

The Beat Goes On

posted in Life, Television

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So I have aged another year: no longer able to call myself an early twenty-something. Comfortingly, paranoid glances in the mirror reveal that crows feet are still a long way off. On the other hand, it seems neural degeneration has commenced in earnest. The most adult conversation had whilst making dinner this evening occurred after a discussion of wooden spoon rhythms culminated in the question:

“What if Simon Amstell were to present Countdown?”

Channel 4 would doubtless pay the saviour of Never Mind The Buzzcocks a vast sum of money to sit in for a week, throw withering comments at a cowering Carol Vorderman and reduce the already-timid dictionary corner to page-quivering wrecks. Surely ratings would soar as tantalised television viewers at home collectively held their breath in anticipation of the dreaded taboo: the tawdry yet inevitable puns on Richard Whiteley’s untimely death, and the resulting gasps of disapproval from a loyal studio audience of grieving would-be widows.

Yes – it’s all downhill from here. When the only constructive conversation that can be had involves cruel, questionable make-believe television programmes, you know there’s not long before all that’s left is to babble in a nondescript manner about the weather (and haven’t we had a dreadful summer!). And I’m not the only one whose marbles are rolling away: other housemate is cramming his mouth with last year’s Christmas pudding smeared with Flora and bathed in milk.

It’s all going terribly wrong. Send help.

Grumpy bruised rib

posted in Life

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So I went go-karting. I crashed. It was fun. Then my foot swelled up for a couple of days and got better. Then a rib on my left side started hurting and has been painful since – I can’t lie flat or lie on that side without some considerable pain. Ibuprofen provides some respite but I’m not a fan of painkillers. Exercise is pretty much out of the question, frustratingly. Help!

Ephemera from the North

posted in Life, Travel

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Having spent a couple of days visiting Sheffield and Wrexham, I have returned with:

• A beef and mustard sandwich
• A Sega Mega Drive in original box with one controller and Sonic The Hedgehog
• A 61-key Yamaha keyboard
• A midi hifi system from the shallow depths of 1999 with two(!) tape decks, minidisc *and* three CD changer
• A new set of Fall Out Boy lyrics: #this ain’t a scene, it’s a goddamn arms race part-time ostrich
• A new-found appreciation for running in hilly areas
• A mental map of Glossop Tesco
• Some pictures of me wrestling a cat:

All of the above are up for grabs. Drop me a line if you’re interested!

Update: sandwich has gone. Yum.

Revisiting the ghosts

posted in Life

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In December I set myself a set of goals for the year ahead. Just over four months in, things are looking OK:

• Get fitter, enter and run a half marathon
  

  I’ve entered the Great North Run on September 30th, and I’ll be running for Sue Ryder care. So far my training schedule hasn’t set the world on fire, but now the weather’s less dubious I’m beginning to ramp up my efforts, helped in no small part by runningahead, a great website which logs running stats on your behalf and graphs them. Neat.

• Take a photography course, and if money permits, buy a digital SLR
  Money’s been tighter than I thought, but I have joined the photography club at work (aaw) and so far been learning all about F-stops and whatnots.
• See more live music (already lined up for January-June 2007: Imogen Heap, Scott Matthews, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, Regina Spektor, The Shins, Muse, Metric and Ray Lamontagne)
  Add to this: Cinematic Orchestra, and a trip to Glastonbury, and I’d say things are shaping up pretty well…
• Write a song
  I’m currently keyboard-phobic. I have a beautiful one set up in my room and every time I go near it I worry about how awful I’ll be through lack of practice. It’s a viscious circle.
• Visit Brugges (before June)
  Erm…
• Move minor9th.com to wordpress and write about music more (by April)
  Done!

Belated thoughts on my first trip to California

posted in Life, Travel

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Some notes on my trip to California:

Stranger than Sherrybaby
So I was watching Stranger Than Fiction on the trip to LAX, and getting quite engrossed in the lightweight story about Harold Crick (played by the affable Will Ferrell) and his love interest Ana Pascal (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) when all of a sudden, Ana – a Harvard dropout who has opened a cake shop – turns out also to be a single mother with a bit of a drug problem. Deep! Mysteriously, she has also become the film’s main protagonist. Will Ferrell and his comic relief are nowhere to be seen. I start to feel a bit uncomfortable. Ana’s situation gets worse when she is forced to go into rehab. 20 minutes pass before I realise that the generously-sized german man next to me leaned on the remote, flipping me from Stranger Than Fiction to Sherrybaby without me noticing. Note to British Airways – don’t put two Maggie Gyllenhaal movies on adjacent channels please (I know that wide-enough seats is rather too much to ask)

Weatlh gradients
So in London you can be walking down one street where the houses are worth millions, turn the corner and end up in some of the roughest areas of the city. The same is definitely true in California – San Diego and LA are both cities where haves and have-nots live on completely different planes. However, nowhere has the difference between wealth and poverty been so raw as in this picture of myself sitting next to the brilliant Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of amazon.com:

Simon and Jeff at ETech 07, originally uploaded by plasticbag.

Braaaaaains
… is what I spent a large proportion of last week saying whilst playing Werewolf. I blame the Sonic Body Pong pioneer, Tikva Morowati (who incidentally has the most infectious laugh known to man)

“That’s out of hand”
Apparently this means “that’s rather silly and slightly unbelievable”

“ridiculous”
… this means “very good indeed, old chap”

EekTech
Normally I consider myself to be reasonably technically au-fait, but this conference blew me away. From the lovely Marc Escobosa who showed me how to use my MacBook like less of a n00b, to Scott Berkun the project management guru, to Danah Boyd whose insight into social networks is incredible – all these people and more made me realise just how much good stuff is out there and how much I need to catch up.

Surfliner
In terms of scenery, this train journey is pretty awesome, travelling through some pretty bleak parts of LA before hugging the coast with largely uninterrupted views of the Pacific. Beautiful stuff. I stopped off on the way back from San Diego to LA at the imaginatively named Oceanside – which is right next to the ocean. The locals sneered at me (pasty and carrying a laptop and a scraggy backpack) and I couldn’t shake my booty with the beach bums and bumettes (is that a word?) but fun was had nonetheless.

My first-ever glimpse of the Pacific ocean, originally uploaded by minor9th.

Hi, my name’s Stereo Mic
Drinking several Surfers on Acid in Rick’s bar on Main St in Santa Monica messed with my head rather a lot. I lay the blame squarely on Kerry, who also surreptitiously got me into watching Top Design, playing Wario on the Wii and cycling along the beach. None of which was half bad at all. Yay Kerry.

Getty outta town
The Getty Center is a billion-dollar beauty, impossibly located a million miles away from sidewalks on a hill overlooking Bel Air (I walked through a very American Dream neighbourhood to get to it). The tour guides are called docents, which means they are more knowledgeable but also more cynical, which was fun.

Santa Monica pier is a busy place at night
Unlike its portrayal by 24 – in Season 5 there’s a bit of a chase on the deserted pier in the 9-10pm hour. I can report that it’s a misleading episode! Loads of people around. All on the ferris wheel, too.

Pacific wheel on Santa Monica pier, originally uploaded by minor9th.

Hollywood history museum
… was slightly disappointing. Sorry guys – but despite being located in the old Max Factor building, and having a hell of a lot of Cool Stuff From Films (including ruby slippers and Brokeback Mountain shirts) I was a bit weirded out. The little old lady at the front desk was way too excitable, too.

I want that one
I’ll forever be baffled by the people who, at baggage reclaim, wander up to the most conspicuous bag on the carousel (you know, the red one with the pink polka dots and pictures of sausages stuck on it), paw the sides, grasp the handle, check the label tag, and then decide it’s not theirs after all. I refrained from collecting photographic evidence as I thought some burly anti-terror policemen would come and bop me on the nose.

So I totally fell in love with the Californian lifestyle. If I could
do something about my ineptitude with motor vehicles and the extreme whiteness of my skin which makes it reflect all sunlight, perhaps I’d have a chance of living there. In the meantime I’ll hang on to fond memories and bask in London’s freakishly beautiful springtime.

Earwigged at the cinema…

posted in Film, Life

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Guy 1: So have you seen Sunshine yet?

Guy 2: Nah, not yet. What’s it about?

Guy 1: Oh, y’know, it’s a bit like Solaris. Kindof boring drift through space with some weird stuff. It’s not action, it’s not even a thriller.

Guy 2: Doesn’t sound great.

Guy 1: The worst of it is that Chris Evans is in it, and he doesn’t take his top off.

Guy 2: Oh well there’s no point in seeing it at all then.

Guy 1: Indeed.

London in the spring

posted in Food, Life, London

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23°C in Ealing today, so the first 99 of the year was consumed.

Things I noticed whilst buying my sugar high:

• A medium 99 with a flake and a little bit of strawberry goop now costs £1.60.
• Ice cream men all look the same: curly mullet and massive hands.
• Strawberry goop still not on sale as a delicious treat by itself apart from in supermarkets (where it’s not the same anyway) Darn.

Do forget your toothbrush

posted in Food, Life, Travel

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Americans replace their toothbrushes on average only 1.9 times per year. Grim. But how often do they go out of town, even for a day or two? Forgetting your toothbrush and having being forced to buy a new one might end up solving all sorts of problems to do with plaque nasties.

Just a post-travel, pre-Easter-chocolate-fest thought…

Non-starter For Ten

posted in Life, London, Pub

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In true grown-up-before-our-time fashion, us Ealing folk have been regularly partaking in a local pub quiz under the genius name of Crouching Woman, Hidden Cucumber for nearly a year. It mainly entails us ending up with a middling score (apart from weeks when there are questions on The Wizard of Oz) and listening to the quizmaster mispronounce all sorts of basic phrases such as ‘Leicester’ and ‘cheese’.

Many a happy Monday evening was enjoyed until the pub introduced a league. A bloody league. The smell of competition drove the hardcore regulars wild: they started sneaking home from work at lunchtime in order to bag a table before the points-hungry masses turned up, leaving us tardy city-types scrabbling for discarded barstools at 8pm. Alas, this week the pub reached capacity, and we had to settle for a non-trivial pint a few doors down instead, where the barmaid was mostly absent and the seat in the corner smelt of sick.

It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts, eh? Right. Whatever.

Five things most people don’t know about me

posted in Life, Meme

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I was tagged for this meme a while ago by Meg and have spent the intervening weeks struggling to think of noteworthy quirky facts about myself. There aren’t many. But I tried.

1. I have a forked uvula

   A rather strange trait that my sister and I share is our strange bifid uvula: that is, the dangly bit at the back of our throat splits in two. Apparently it can be associated with submucous cleft palate, but it’s not a big deal and doesn’t mean we’re freaks.

2. Gabriel Yared once asked me to get naked with him in front of a 50-strong audience

   That’s right: he composed the music for Betty Blue, The English Patient and Cold Mountain and then, one day in March 2005, he asked me to join him in disrobing before a group of surprised University students. I should point out that he was using it as an endearing turn of phrase, and what he actually wanted was a nice bit of musical deconstruction, not a spell of piano-top fornication. Just as well – his beard is pretty terrifying.

3. In 1990, I asked a serious question about diarrhoea in front of 200 people

   Poor 7-year-old me. I’d just had my first experience of horrendous fizzy gravy. A week or two later, at a school assembly about fire alarm procedure, I thought it only prudent to ask the headmaster – in front of the entire school and staff – what to do in a fire emergency if you’re stuck on the loo. Minutes of laughter and years of name-calling ensued. And, ironically, a fire. But my bowels were behaving themselves that day. Phew.

4. I failed my cycling proficiency test

   Evil thing. I failed this because I was crap at cycling slowly and couldn’t control my bike without falling off or having to put a foot down. I now have a slightly loathing of cyclists.

5. Our school band played for the Queen and her hubby

   Somehow, Wrexham managed to bag the Queen to open a revamped leisure centre in the middle of the town (with a rather distinctive roof structure). In a slight talent mismatch, they also asked our school wind band to play at the event. Clearly we got rained on and nearly froze to death, and Duke made some innuendo small talk about fingers and clarinet holes. A day to remember. Or not.

And five more people to do this: Vic, Will, Kat, Mary, and Dan.