scruffian

These pictures are from a few days ago. Just a bit of digging going on, while Becky stuffs her face.

Tim has been riding a lot of flatland recently due to his broken limb. This has mean that he rides around with his bars inverted like this so the front end is shorter and the headtube angle is steeper. He still can’t do many tricks as they take a long time to learn, but he is good at manuals now.

There is a new media page up in the media section or here. You have to wait for a while for it to load.

Apparently life is full of strange coincidences. I didn’t know about this until yesterday when I walked into silverscreen (a dvd shop in maidstone). They were playing and REM song called Electrolite. I just wandered over to the sale stand and pick up a dvd – as it happened it was “Mulholland Drive”, a film by David Lynch. At almost the same time the song that was playing sang the line “If I ever want to fly, Mulholland Drive, I am alive.” This was strange. The expalination is from here and below.

“There is a significance to R.E.M.’s name-dropping of Mulholland Drive in Electrolite. Mulholland Drive is a really long (42km I think), really windy road that goes across the hills overlooking Los Angeles. You get some stunning views from up there, and it’s right near the Hollywood sign, hence “Hollywood is under me.” And when you drive along Mulholland Drive, and you’re above one of the world’s biggest cities, you do very much feel like you’re flying (“if I ever want to fly”).

As for the film, I think it’s quite possibly the best ever made. I am a very very big Lynch fan and Mulholland Drive is what got me into his work. The metaphor of Mulholland Drive is used to similar effect as in Electrolite. The film is all about Hollywood, and the naivity some take in coming there to experience stardom and love, and end up crushed, bitter and twisted. The only drawback is it’s near impossible to understand what’s going on first time of viewing, and that makes a lot of people give up. But I like a film where the plot isn’t fully explained in the first 10 minutes, something you have to actually think about. So take your time in watching Mulholland Drive – it truly is a wonderful piece of cinema. It’s probably only $5 cos it’s about 3 years old, it’s pretty cheap in the UK now too.

I was in L.A. with my dad earlier in the year and we made a special effort to drive along Mulholland Drive to pay tribute to the film and to Lynch, and as we did we listened to Electrolite, paying tribute also to R.E.M.’s homage to Hollywood.”

Bored yet? Another strange coincidence was that a few months ago I bumped into an old school friend (Happy Time Harry) who also happed to be working in Maidstone, so we started travelling to work together. Then after a while I started giving his sisters boyfriend (Bruce Lee – that’s his real name) a lift to.

Yesterday Tim was working in Sainsburys, and he asked one of his usual customers if they would like cash back, and they said “Yes please, I need some petrol money to give to your brother for giving my boyfriend a lift to work.” Confused?

Well it turned out that this lady was Happy Time Harry’s sister and Bruce Lee’s girfriend, and she recognised Tim as my brother after only seeing me one, in the dark, for about a minute. It’s sort of one of those non-anicdotes isn’t it a mad world.

by this.

Vote now kids.

I have been to work on pretty shady a little this morning. Joe – where’s my money?
The shovel load is always amazing. Trip to Caversham BMX track soon?
What has happened to unknown trails rider?
Has dave done his new site yet?
Will we still be doing this when we are 50?

Every office must have it’s big Keith. This is ours. He even has the goatie. I have been wanting photo of him for a while but it looks quite suspect taking your camera into the office and taking a picture of a big fat man, so I had to be steath. I was “changing that batteries” in the camera which gave me the opportunity to have it out, and then i rested it on the desk and pressed the shutter button while casually looking at something else.

As Tom said. Team noid are off to Sittingbourne tonight. Would be good to see you there, but then again it would be good if it wasn’t busy, so don’t feel obliged!

You forget how good summer was until you look back at the old pictures. I have redone my media pages and regrouped them a bit there is now a media 2004 and a media 2003 page. That’s a fair bit of old media now. There’s a few new pages slipped in there which I will advertise soon, but if you are super keen you can go and try to find them. I was looking through them and I found this picture. These trails went from flat to flat in about 2 months. They weren’t ridden enough times but it was still fun to go to the knicker trails and have fires and things. New trails are fun.

Keane had the best selling album of 2004. Rudi’s mum, Max, helped Keane record this album. I made a website for Rudi’s Mum’s production company (Pink Scales). Does this make me famous? No. Anyway go and look at the website if you are bored.

I have not heard the album, only the singles. I quite like the first single “Somewhere Only We Know”. Not so keane (ouch) on the other two but the last one “The Last Time” I really like. Seb said that the album wasn’t great.

Keane are from Battle, which is near Hastings and where the battle of Hastings was fought in 1066. Quick history lesson there.

On Sunday me and Ben were playing pool in my parents’ dining room. Pool is not so safe a game as we had imagined so I think we were not prepared for what followed. I was just lining up for a shot, on the black as it happened when suddenly there was a small earthquake detectable only by myself which caused me to ram the pool cue into my thumb nail. Ben thought this was hilarious but it was actually quite serious and I thought for some time that my nail would subsequently go black and fall off.

It hurt a lot so my dad suggested I ran it under cold water. I think to make it go numb and to wash the blood away as the nail had been bent right back about half way down and had dug into my skin under my nail.

Unfortunately rather than numbing the pain the cold water made it about 17 times worse. So I had to kneel down by the sink and then I thought I was going to be very sick. I could kind of feel the sick ready to come out which made me make quite a few sick noises. Ben had stopped laughing by this time and was sympathetically rubbing my back so the sickness passed.

I realised at this point that I was kneeling at the sink which wasn’t particularly nice so I thought I would go and lie down on a sofa. When I stood up I couldn’t see anything and apparently hung onto the coat pegs saying “I can’t see anything” because I couldn’t so I decided to lie down.

My body temperature was now 330 degrees which was quite hot and I couldn’t see for a while. It was like when you have a head rush and those grey squares come up on your eyes but normally they go only a bit of the way up and you just have to hold on to something for a while but this time it went right up for ages and then it went down again and I got up and was ok. I think it was shock. My nail didn’t fall off.