Extracts from my Notes app
A short post with apologies and promises (threats) that I’m working on some longer pieces which will appear over the next little bit. Among other things, I’m working on the second part of my giant music essay (you can read Part One here), something on ‘wellness’, something on platform-mediated social distortions, plus two short stories that I’ve been fucking around with long enough that they just have to stuck up somewhere where people can read them if they want to.
I have been the worst kind of sick* over the last couple of weeks or so, really coughing up palmfuls of lung gunk, sneezing, head full of hot fog, deep conviction that if I watch another second of a new sitcom with no jokes in it someone, or I, will die, you know the sort of thing, and that’s interfered with my productivity and capacities. It also means that I have had some cauterised half-thoughts which have been trapped in my brain by snot with no hope of release other than here, so in the meantime: one plug, and some lists.
Plug! Masters of our Domain, the podcast about the hit 90s sitcom Seinfeld is doing a live show at the Vauxhall Comedy Club at the end of February – get your tickets below! We will be talking about Bee Movie with special guest Alex Kealy. It would be very nice to see lots of you there, because the bee costume I ordered is very expensive and I doubt refundable.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/masters-of-our-domain-live-bee-movie-tickets-513111940627
*not the worst kind, obviously
A short list of things I invented and that technically I am due royalty payments whenever someone else does, says or writes them (note: this list is an on-going project):
The format ‘I’m his social media manager and I told him to post this’.
I came up with ‘time to take a long drink of hot coffee’ but not ‘and then check the news’ or whatever. Someone else came up with ‘and then check the news’, I don’t know who.
I didn’t come up with introducing the members of the band on stage, but my grandfather did so I have inherited the copyright.
I invented changing how your shoelaces look.
I didn’t invent the expression ‘don’t mind if I do’ but I did popularise it.
Keep cup? My idea, but not the lid.
Calling animals ‘little fellas’.
A short list of people I would like to see given the Greta Gerwig directorial biopic treatment, also ideally starring Greta Gerwig regardless of how many problems that might present:
Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury
Augusto Pinochet
Thatcher, but ending after she invented Mr Whippy
The wife of the man who faked his own death after a canoe accident
Liz Truss
A short list of scams: a little taster for a larger ramble on the subject of wellness:
Journaling
‘Gratitude practices’
Retinoids
Wearing SPF in the winter**
Virginia Woolf***
**you probably can do this one if you like but it has a big red SCAM stamp in my document pile
***also on the Greta Gerwig list