Recent Events

An interesting week in Wolsey's has just passed. Last Thursday or Friday a representative from Snow Patrol's record company rang the bar, asking if they could play a gig on the next Thursday (12th). While the guy who originally took the call thought they were taking the piss, he did pass on the request to Simon, the bar manager, who phoned back and said yes, they'd be happy for them to play. Apparently it was to be an acoustic performance to be recorded and included on a future DVD. Needless to say since Wolsey's holds about 150-200 for a band night, and Snow Patrol have sold out 2 nights at the Ulster Hall in less than 2 hours (capacity approx. 1500), keeping all this a secret was a priority, because it was thought they would cancel if it all got too hectic.

Therefore it was somewhat of a surprise to know that practically everyone in Bangor seemed to know about it by the Wednesday afternoon. Rumours of it were mentioned on the forums of the band's website, and apparently some eejit sent an e-mail around MM Group, Bangor's largest employers telling everyone all about it. It was even apparently mentioned by Colin Murray on his (national) Radio 1 show, although by this stage the record company had already phoned to cancel. No reason was given, but I read today on the website that they have cancelled several gigs this weekend due to their lead singer Gary Lightbody being unwell. Although the bar did get some some cancelled posters made up, it was decided that since it was never officially to take place, officially canceling it would be slightly odd!

So, approx two hours after the phone call from the record company, people started arriving in Wolsey's. I was off on the Friday and was planning to head down to the bar about 7.30 to see what was happening, but first made up a CD for the bar featuring Snow Patrol as the first and last track, just to wind people up a bit more! By the time I arrived, the place was almost full, with rumours going round the place like wildfire. Anyone who asked the bar had been told it was cancelled, yet most didn't believe it. I think they thought it was all a huge ruse to get them to give up their seats! One of the best rumours was the band were actually hiding upstairs but were waiting for the crowd to thin out before coming down to play! As if!

All in all a top night, just a shame that they didn't actually play. Although if they had I think there would have been about 1000 people outside the bar. I felt a bit sorry for the Flange having to come on and try and entertain that crowd, but once it was made clear that Snow Patrol weren't playing they accepted it readily enough. Although I don't think the band helped themselves with some of their comments slagging them off for not turning up, especially if the guy was genuinely ill, but there's no telling some people.

Signs Of Society's Imminent Collapse Pt. 285

Big sodding Brother. Thankfully over for another year, I still fail to see why a perfectly sensible human being would choose to watch this programme. It's rubbish, it's boring, it's pointless, it's artificial, it's a fraud, and yet this year's has been a record breaker by all accounts. It's certainly set records as far as I'm concerned. Never before have I seen less reason to watch this than the parade of dimwits, wannabe's, slappers and arseholes whose every witless utterance is foisted upon us by the tabloid press as if it were Moses himself delivering God's laws from Mt. Sinai. Who cares? No-one would except the programme is relentlessly hyped up for weeks before it starts and then used to fill pages and pages every day while it fills our screens. The only way to prevent this is yet again to not buy tabloid papers, be they the Official Big Brother Paper, the Unofficial Big Brother Paper, or the Official Anti-Big Brother. It all means the same thing. They are full of worthless shit, stealing space away from real news stories, because editors and proprietors aren't willing to trust their readership, and credit them with any sort of intelligence above that of plankton. In saying that you really do have to wonder when you read the 'thoughts' of Daily Star 'readers', and their texted in opinions on the upcoming football season:

'Kick out eriksson the geezers a sex maniac' - Speros hutchins, Bromley.
'Put evil saddam in the efc frontline. Scumbag must neva b allowed 2trouble ne1 agen' - TUX LFC4EVA
'I thought kenyon was a good business man 2 me buyin playas not heard of ayear ago and payin 5 times over the odds 4 them doesnt sound good business 2 me hope he nos what s doin?' - James
'2 amos you remind of a bin full of rubbish leeds 4 the title' - huggy.
'NUFC, last chance saloon 4 ur team coz once mary poppins retires uv got the mecenary n sicknote firing blanks' - BAZ OV BORO.
'only 1 van the man this season van persie mancs watch and learn' - slippery
'is it me or does every1 just hate wolves! We r premier league enough said' - Matt
'why watch black white when you can watch in colour' - pj safc
'3 words 4 u all liverpool liverpool liverpool enuf said' - mk 1 lfc'

Frankly, if you're texting your ill-formed opinions and enemy baiting to a newspaper, then you don't deserve to own a phone. When you do it in finest fuckwit text-speak, you don't deserve to breathe. With predictive texting it can be far quicker to type the word than it is to think of an idiotic abbreviation, then type it out character by character, especially when it takes four key strokes to type a letter 's', one of the most commonly used characters in our language!

I don't want to get all snooty about this but it really annoys me when people use that abbreviated language. To paraphrase something I read recently on the same subject, 'The written word is the finest weapon we have in the battle against ignorance. We should take better care of it.'

Right. Another rant over, another post, errm ... posted. Going to go and have a lie down now!