It's literally been going on too long

One of the things I do far too often is think about things too much. Well, that and I always try and find a humourous situation in stuff.

Being a Ray Mears fan and being the owner of a Sky+ box puts me in the great position of being able to watch the great man approximately 23.5 hours a day... obviously the 30 minutes left is for bathroom breaks and to stock up on fake fishy things and chocolate flavoured Collons.

Without going into too much detail, Ray Mears once said something in one episode that has stuck with me ever since and that I refer to every day. Honestly.

During an episode when he was constructing a kayak without modern tools he made the comment: "The thing with these old tools is that thay're not very ergonomic. I woke up in the middle of the night with terrible pain in my hands and this morning my hands are literally on fire."

Yep - poor old Ray's hands were literally on fire. Except they obviously weren't. So now every time someone misuses the word literally I take notice, as do my friends. And on top of that I now regularly make ludicrous statements that include the word literally.

Some examples I've overheard:
Commentary for football: "That goal has literally knocked the stuffing out of them."
In a news report: "Korea is literally the tip of the iceberg."

Some examples of ludicrous things I've said:
"I've literally been there 53 trillion times."
On the post here about being wired.
"My typos literally have a life of their own."
"I literally didn't stop, yesterday."
"I've literally just bought a ton of food to cheer me up."

The problem now is I'm finding it difficult to stop using the word 'literally' and when I hear others use it in a serious sense I can't stop chuckling and thinking of poor Ray's scorched hands. But I don't know whether I want to. I like having a smile on my face when someone says something. Even if it is a serious documentary about politics or something - the word 'literally' with still induce a smile.

Give it a go - go 'literally' spotting with me.

Hairy men are great

Last night I attended a great little talk thing at the ICA all about facial hair.

It was cool - me and Charlie bumped into Dan. My feeble attempt of a few days growth was overshadowed by both of them and some others in the room. I felt like a child with a bad haircut... although there's nothing new there to be honest.

As well as a live demonstration where a professional barber shaved a member of the audience, we had a panel talking about facial hair: how it has progressed and regressed over the years, how it's still a big taboo for women and Billy Childish telling us about some run-ins with the locals in Chatham due to his facial hair.

Of course all of this encouraged us to swap tales of first razors and ever decreasing sideburns (to the point of having the sides of our heads virtually bald - or maybe that was just me)...

Afterwards I had personally arrived at the conclusion that any successful facial hair needs massive sideburns a la Amos from Emmerdale Farm or Neil Young.

A good night.

Interlude #2

Following on from the monumentally successful Interlude #1 here, I thought I'd add some more little links.


For this one I told the recipients:

That some people need a hit;
Some people are in a God damn hurry;
Everyone loves Berries;
You need to make your consumers feel like putty in your hands;
Without [the product], life has no joy, no hope, no nowt;
We brainstormed a lot;
We worked very quickly indeed;
... but we never mixed our drinks.


I love doing this. It allows me to try and make my addled mind into something that has elements of logic attached to it.

A presentation what I wrote

I know it takes a while for blogs to take off - especially in this world where it seems every creative has one - so to my literally myriad* readers - here's a treat. It's a presentation that I co-wrote with Charlie and Rory (my partner for Fairbrand) and presented to the quite large Nike last week.

The purpose of it wasn't to answer the massive 'good/ green' debate but to cause some discussion and give some perspectives. From that point of view I think it was very successful.

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* In this case 'myriad' means literally 1 or 2.

A touch of glass

On Saturday I undertook the most British of pastimes. I watched a game of football.

This isn't a rare occurrence for me. I watch quite a lot of football... actually being a Newcastle United fan I should write "I watch quite a lot of football being played by the opposition" but we won't go into the quality on show by the team I support. That really would bore you to tears...

Anyway, Saturday was like any other away day. I met a friend, we visited a couple of bars, had a chat and then wandered to the game. We watched our team give glimpses of quality play (that led is into yet another false sense of optimism) and we walked our 3-0 losers. We then walked back to a bar, had a few more drinks and then went our separate ways. All very very normal to a football fan... and the result very very normal for a Newcastle United fan.

After leaving my friend I went and met another friend for a couple of drinks to wind down the day out. Only after raising a glass with him did I realise that it was nearly 8pm, I'd been out for nearly 8 hours and that was the first time I'd had a glass in my hand. Everywhere else had given us plastic drinking vessels. Even when we bought bottles they were decanted into a plastic. (Not enjoying entry-level drinks like Carling and Fosters leads to the issue of having a bottle of Beck's decanted into a pint pot. This obviously means you buy 2 bottles and get them poured into the same plastic which in turn means you pay £6 for a pint.)

The ticket for the game was £32, we spent roughly the same on beer each, the pies and hotdogs were £3 each and we had a padded seat. A highly middle class, expensive and sensible day out. Yet, it seems that we're not trusted with glass. Of course it only takes one incident to occur to set the wheels in motion, but where we were has a lot of 'Home Only' bars (particularly popular in London) - and as far as i could tell - they had glasses. So - is it only us uncouth heathens from the north that aren't trusted? Maybe the locals think that because we're from the north we're used to drinking from cow horns or something?

The power of a good presentation

This morning I had to give a presentation to my PGCERT class at St. Martins.
As Russell mentions here, planners do a lot of presentations. They sort of become second nature and you sort of know that you're ok at them.

But just once in a while you nail one. And you feel great for it.

Earlier in the week we (me and some friends/ colleagues) presented to a room full of big bods from a big-arse company. That went well too. I'll post that at a later date, but today I just wanted to put up the slides from the presentation today.

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And to add to it - I'm not going to put up any narration. There are only images and 2 slides with text. This isn't for any vainglorious attempt to show off my presenting skills (it only took me 15 minutes to sort out) - but probably to hightlight the fact that any successful presentation needs considered, accurate narration. Oh, and Flickr and access to a digital camera are essential.

If anyone is the least bit interested - get in touch and I'll talk you through it.

Optimate graphs

Yesterday I bought a gizmo for my scooter battery. My scooter is a good few years old and thus isn't in the best condition it could be. As soon as the temperature hits sub-continental (i.e. if it's not really sunny), the battery dies.

So I bought an Optimate. I'd had them recommended to me.

This image was on the back and it gave me a great sense that this gizmo knows exactly what it's doing. I can tell by these two graphs that I've got a quality product. I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what they mean, but that sort of doesn't matter. They've gone to the trouble to put them on the packaging so it's good enough for me.

I'm just glad the instructions said "Plug it in and connect and the Optimate does all the work for you."