The Comet of Death

Ok, so I'm reading this science book by Bill Bryson called 'A short history of nearly everything' and I get to a chapter about comets. Bill asks a scientist how much warning we would have if we knew a comet was going to hit the Earth. 'Oh, probably none' the scientist says. Apparently scientists can't really track comets or asteroids as they're so hard to see and you wouldn't actually be able to see one until it started heating up in the Earth's atmosphere which is about 1 second before it hits the Earth.
When asked to describe the events that would happen as the comet hit the Earth, the scientist described it like this:

'An asteroid or comet travelling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth's atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn't get out of the way and would become compressed... compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor's path - people, houses, factories, cars - would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame'

This follws with:

'Now every living thing within 250 that hadn't been killed by the heat of the entry would now be killed by the blast, and everything after that would witness a flash of blinding light, followed by 'an apocolyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a rolling wall of darkness reaching into the heavens... its approach would be eerily silent as it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound... anyone in a tall building would see a bewildering veil or turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion.' Pretty much everything within a 1,500 km radius of the blast would be flattened and on fire, and ripped apart by debris and flying projectiles.

The worst thing about this is that we have no technology capable of stopping any of this from happening. All that bullshit about sending a team into space or firing a nuclear missile to break up the comet in movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon is just fanciful rubbish as for one, we don't actually have any working rockets capable of leaving the Earth's atmosphere right now (the last one, the Saturn 5, was retired in 2005) nor the technology to guide said missile over millions of miles of space and even if we did hit the comet with a nuclear warhead, we'd just make a string of comets that would slam into the Earth one after another and now they'd be intensely radioactive leaving us to die slowly and horribly.

This information really ruined my day. Thanks Bill, you bastard.

3 Animals that I Hate

Small Dogs

Before you get all judgemental on me, I love dogs - I am truly the biggest fan of man's best friend and there have only been about 6 years out of my 25 year-long life when I haven't had one. However, small dogs are not dogs. They are rats. Stupid, small, yappy, horrible, bug-eyed rats. They are skittish, ugly and neurotic and I won't have one in my house. My girlfriend wants a chihuahua! Can you believe that? A fucking Chihuahua! It can fit inside a damn teacup! What if I ruin a perfectly good mug of coffee by pouring it all over a distugsting rat-dog hiding in my coffee cup? I want a Border Collie - one of those sheep dogs of decent size - not too big so that it can't fit in the car and exiles me from my own bed, but not so small that it can fall down the plug hole in the bathroom sink, and intelligent enough so that it doesn't interfere with my coffee making and can gather up lost sheep if the need arises. A dog for all occasions.

Pigeons

Now this doesn't apply to wood pigeons, only those dirty black city pigeons. Now, I know a bird's gotta eat, I'm not passing jugement on their diet of vomit and spilled kebab, but I draw the line when I see a pigeon eating KFC. IT'S YOUR COUSIN FOR FUCK'S SAKE!!!! Cannibal pigeons... I don't know what the world is coming too. And another thing that bothers me is when I see a boy pigeon trying to hit on a girl pigeon. There's a type of bird in the rain forest (or somewhere) that buils a home -well it's more like an art gallery actually- in order to impress his prospective mate. He builds this roof of sticks (it's all very intricate) and lines the floor with the shiniest black beetle shells and most colourful petals that he can find, creating this fucking paradise of a house, and he just sits and waits patiently. Then there's the city pigeon who puffs up his neck and dances around trying to corner the girl pigeon before stamping on her neck and raping her at a bus stop in broad daylight. I've seen similar things happen at night clubs, but I never expected such things from my feathered bretheren. You pigeons disgust me.

Spiders

I know I'm not alone here. These guys have 8 legs, 10 eyes, spin a sticky trap from a hole in their ass and hide in dark corners waiting for unexpected prey to get entangled in their web of doom before sinking their fangs into them and turning their insides into soup. Yes, the spider is indeed the minion of Satan and proof that God doesn't exist (because if he did, he wouldn't be so cruel as to create something as fucked up as the spider). If you see a contradiction in what I just said there ("you can't have Satan without God and I just said that the spiders were the minions of...blah blah blah"), I don't care and you can go fuck yourself. They hide under toilet seats, they can move all these legs in a weird way, their knees are above their heads, and the average human is said to eat 8 of these things in a lifetime. I just hope to God (the one that doesn't exist) that isn't true. Anyone who likes spiders is sick and badly needs to see a psychiatrist; it's like saying you find Jeffrey Dahmer charming.

The Drunk, the Homeless and the Money Plant

So I was going to play a gig in Camden last night. I texted 10 of my friend but only 3 showed up, which was already depressing by itself. Anyway, we had a few drinks, watched some poetry readings and some good bands - some guy playing punk with a banjo - and everything was good. I remember feeling a little restless about playing. Usually I get nervous. The first time I ever played I was sweating and blushing like a mother fucker; I thought I was going to throw up all down my bass then drop dead in a big pool of vomit, sweat, piss and crap and I would lie there for years in the venue but my nails and hair would continue growing even though I was dead, like some Egyptian mummy. Last night wasn't like that though, I just wanted to play. I remember going to the bathroom at the venue and being like 'Man, I can't wait to get up on that stage and just rock out'. However when my turn came, we had technical difficulties - some wire in the pickups of my bass might have broke, or the speakers weren't compatible with the bass level, but whatever the fuck happened, I played one song then had to leave the stage and let Kevin play the rest of the gig by himself. Man, that pissed me off big time. I spent the rest of the night getting wasted with my friends and apologising for dragging them down there for nothing.

5 beers down and 1:30 in the morning we're standing by this guy selling food; burgers and tea and stuff, when I see this homeless woman walk by. She has a shaved head and is pushing her stuff around in a shopping trolley, her big blue checkered bags tied together with string just like the peasants from the countryside do in China. She's holding a stack of Big Issue magazines and, making a little nest for herself on the kerb, she settles down and waits for someone to buy a magazine. Now, I never usually give money to homeless guys because in London, they're either on drugs, or they're nuts - though the guys who sell the Big Issue seem to be legit; they are making an effort to work for the money which they get to keep. There was something about this woman (perhaps it was the alcohol, I don't know) that appealed to me and I just felt like doing something good. I didn't have enough change on me for a magazine, but I asked her if she wanted something from the vendor. She thought about it for a second and then said 'Tea, no sugar' and so I bought her a tea. I offered her some food also but she said she pointed to her bags and said was fine. I guess she had a stash hidden away in there. She thanked me for the tea and my friend Oliver said it was 'very Christian' of me, in which I objected saying it wasn't Christian, just an act of humanity.

I arrived home at 2am - drunk and with a semi-angry girlfriend who was worried because I'd missed her calls. Apparently I snored and kept her up all night so she didn't sleep well and had to wake up early. I was hung over and slept until 2pm and got very little done today, though I did apply for the position of Exhibition Assistant at the Science Museum. I really hope I get that job, though with my luck it probably won't happen.

Just to let you know, Freddie - I just found out - is a Crassula Ovata, or 'Jade Plant', or 'Money Plant' which I think is a cruel name, especially in this economic climate and the fact that I'm unemployed. Why can't they have called it an 'Unemployed Friend Plant' instead of rubbing financial poison in my face. According to Wikipedia, I've apparently been watering him too much over the last few weeks. I've laid off now and am going to let him dry out and get plenty of sunlight, though it's going to be hard to resist picking him up and holding him with me in the shower. Maybe I should move him to the kitchen... I don't like showering alone.

Skating remarks

Today was a productive day. I did the following in this order:

1) Get up and have coffee
2) Write the first music review for rockfeedback.com
3) Fix my stupid Tiscali internet
4) Have a fishfinger sandwich
5) Write the second review for rockfeedback.com
6) Have a bowl of grapes (mix of green and red)
7) Send off 10 CVs in order to find a job
8) Download season 1 of the Sopranos and the entire Beastie Boys discography
9) Watched skateboarding videos on youtube

I had a talk with my friend Alia and we discussed our life plans. I said I wanted to make a 5-10 minute film and enter it into some national competition and that I also wanted to take up skateboarding. She said she wanted to do that too and we should do it together. She also told me that she wants to buy an old rusty car and get a drivers licence. I said she should and that we should go on a road trip around Europe, but she said we'd be killed, so maybe we won't. I don't know if I should do skateboarding - for one, I'm 25 which I think exceeds the age limit. I googled this due to my worry and apprently there is a guy in his 40's who took it up to bond with his 14 year old daughter. You'd have thought he'd want to save her the embarrassment but I guess not. That's all she needs right now - a date to the skate park with her dad so the floppy-haired, Vans-wearing boy of her dreams can watch as her dad plummets off a ramp and shatters his hip. When will parents learn? I don't want to be like that dad. Me with a bunch of kids in South Bank looking at me as if I just beamed down from planet Fuck Head. Maybe I'll pass. No, fuck it. I want to do it. Fuck them!

In other news, I sliced my fingers on a cheese grater while making cacio e pepe, have a gig to play in Camden tomorrow night and have a new-found addiction to flapjack. I will maybe have a stab at making it myself.

Doug out.

Freddie

When my girlfriend and I moved into our new apartment, there was still a former resident in the place. He was a plant. He may not be a he, but I don't know how to check, so for the sake of argument, he is a he. He was sat on the window sill in the bathroom quietly keeping himself to himself. I had plants at my last place but they started to grow a wispy mould on them which I mistook for a spiders web, and since I'm terrified of spiders, I threw them out. I've never had the patience for plants, but this one was different. He's not too tall, and has thick, juicy, tear-shaped leaves. I would shower and look at him sitting there on his window sill and I'd say 'Doug, it isn't your plant. Why the hell should you take care of it? It ain't your problem' but then he started to get dry and droopy. My bathroom buddy was dying. I felt terrible that I had the power to bring this guy back to life, but up until that point I hadn't done anything about it. It's like having a puppy living in your house but you won't feed it because it isn't yours to feed and that's just bullshit. So I started watering him with cups of water. He perked up, but his leaves were still kind of grey and dry looking, so one day I stuck him in the bathtub and held the showerhead over him and rained on him for a while. I wonder when, if ever, the last time he had been rained on was.
That really seemed to help and after a few days (maybe weeks) he was looking healthy, turning slowly toward the sun and his leaves were big and juicy looking again. I stopped watering him with a cup and instead, I'd pick him up and hold him in the shower with me and feel the cold water draining out of the soil as I replaced it with warm, shower water. I don't know if this is good or bad for the plants, but my logic was that tropical plants get warm water and they're huge, so it must be good. His body leant heavily to one side now as he faced the sun coming through the window. I turned him to face away from the sun, but over time he slowly grew up and leant petulantly to the other side. He seemed taller when he did that, so every now and again I turn him so he can grow upwards. I don't know how much sense there is to this, but he looks great.

I called him Freddie because it's a very generic name for objects and I couldn't think of anything more original. That's ok with me, and Freddie doesn't seem to mind.
Soon Freddie will outgrow his plant pot so I'll need to take him down to Colombia Road Flower Market near Shoreditch and get him repotted.

I love Freddie, Freddie loves me, we're as happy as can be.

Coffee and Leo

Today my girlfriend gave me a list of things to do. It read like this:

1) Send CV's
2)Write CD Reviews
3)Call Tiscali
4) Go to the Job Centre
5) Write to your old company

She left early today and so placed the kettle on the stove so that it would wake me up when it started to boil. I asked her to do that, thought it would be a nice way to wake up. I woke up to the screaming of the kettle and stood there in my underpants in the kitchen, to tired to care if the guys in the apartment opposite could see me. I make a coffee then fell back into bed for 2 hours. The coffee was cold when I woke up. The plan had failed.

I reheated the coffee, then made myself another one. I put some brown sugar in and watched as the golden granules slowly sunk into the blackness of the coffee cup. It was real slow, and I saw them disappear a little bit at a time and it reminded me of when Leo diCaprio died in Titanic. I hated the movie and didn't even blink when he froze to that oak door, but watching the granules fall away forever into this coffee cup made me real sad. I thought back to Leo's character and how even though he was dead and it didn't even matter anymore, he was alone in the darkness forever, with nothing around him but the fish and crabs that would occasionally pick at his body. The ocean is so damn alien.

Ok, shower and job centre...