Abbey Road Misleading Crossing

The Abbey Road crossing on The Beatles 1969 album has recently been made a grade two listed. “It means that its secure for a whole new generation of Beatles fans,” a BBC news reporter on London Tonight said last week. “People from all over the world come here just so they can have their picture taken on the famous crossing,” he went on to say as it cut to tourists walking on the crossing.
Then at t the end of the report he slips in he that its not the original crossing as the crossing made famous on the album cover was further down the road but no longer exists. Hold on a minute. So its not the crossing on the album cover at all, its just the nearest one to it. So why has it been made listed? Surely the original crossing should have been made listed before it was taken away. Its not the real one but sshhh don’t tell the tourists.
Marc Boland fans put flowers by the tree that his car crashed into and killed him. If that tree got cut down you can’t just put flowers up against the nearest tree to where the tree was. Well you could but that would be a bit of a dumb thing to do. But then again putting flowers by the tree is a bit dumb or a bit weird anyway. If you were a relative or good friend of Marc Boland’s then laying down a bunch of flowers on the anniversary of his death is understandable but not if you’re a fan of him. Especially as he died over thirty years ago. But then some fans are like this, I saw a documentary on Buddy Holly were every year fans of his would stand out in a freezing cold field in Iowa and pay their respects to him. Pointless.
If you’re passing a place where something is relevant to a musician you like then that’s fair enough, but I don’t think that going out of your way to stand in a field where a plane crashed is.
Going back to Abbey Road- I’ve just read a book on The Band and a lot of the book revolves around the time that they lived in a pink house in Woodstock New York. Bob Dylan used to come around and they would knock out a few tunes in the basement. The Bands first record was called Music From Big Pink ,and if I was passing through Woodstock I’m sure that I’d take a look at the house and its surroundings. But if it had been knocked down I wouldn’t get my camera out take a picture of a nearby house and show people and say, “Look this picture its the house just up the road from the pink house where The Band used to live.”

Post-Pub Wii

I’ve always loved playing video games. I’m not a hardcore gamer who reads gaming magazines and who must have the new Call Of Duty game as soon as its released. I would rather buy it second hand a few months later. And I don’t have to have the latest games console that comes out, so I don’t have defunct consoles like the Game Cube and the Dreamcast laying about collecting dust.
The first games system I had was the Commodore 64 which at the time I thought was truly amazing. Now I have an Xbox 360 and I do believe that its truly amazing. Maybe in twenty years I will think of the Xbox 360 in the same way that I now think of the Commodore 64.
I’m guessing that the next step with gaming is 3D. This might make games consoles like Nintendo’s Wii slightly more interesting to me. But not that much more as I have no interest in the Wii. I’ve played it post-pub around a mates house a couple of times and the novelty rapidly ran thin.
“Come on its your turn to bowl.”
“Alight, how do I do it?”
“Its easy you just have to swing your hand back and up again.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah that’s it.”
Its so easy to play and that is why I don’t like it. That and the awful early nineties Lego type character graphics. The Wii advert on the TV at the moment is an old lady playing it as its aimed at people who don’t usually play video games.
Nintendo have this market sussed. I would never have imagined that I would buy a video game for my mum but the last two Christmases I’ve bought her a Nintendo DS game. Its good as I usually struggle to think what to get her (and everybody else) for Christmas.
The Nintendo Wii is good for social gaming, its just that I prefer to sit in on my own with the curtains drawn as I lose track of time trying to get past a certain point of a game.

Tuition Fees (another 2p worth opinion on the matter)

I really don’t know where I stand on these student protests that are going on. Should further education be free? Yes, no, in a way, well when you put it like that, yes, but saying that., no.
About five years after I left school it seemed like all of a sudden everybody was going to university. I’ve met some people who are at or who went to university who seem as plain dumb. Does that me and most people I went to school with were dumber? No, because only the really academic went to university.
Or maybe since the prominence of the internet more people are gaining the good A level results to get into university. Copy and paste from Wikipedia and then alter it a bit to make it look like their your own work. Or maybe I’m being over cynical. Or maybe I could have gone to university if Wikipedia was about then. Or maybe if I did any homework and studied at all.
Anyway, the students don’t have to pay the money back until they leave university and get a job. So what are they moaning about. Then again nine thousand pounds a year does seem excessive.
I’m all in favour of a protest and making a stand. But what’s the point in smashing windows and spray painting a Winston Churchill statue.
Are the police heavy handed? They have a history of it from the poll tax protests and miner strikes. But I can’t stand them protesters that shout right up in the faces of the police, spit at them, throw missiles and then scream police brutality when they get a slap back. But as long as they don't slap them as hard as they did in China.

The Heating

"Send in your pictures of the snow to our email address,” the BBC news presenter said., for a pointless edition to their website. That was when the snow first hit. The newsreaders aren’t so perky about the snow now that its been here for over a week and flights, roads, and rail have all been heavily disrupted.

At this time of year I prefer crisp cold whether and snow than mild grey skies that always threaten to drizzle. That is until it puts my travel arrangements in jeopardy.
For me the worst thing about winter is the gas bill. But not anymore as the gas bill is inclusive in the rent. The only drawback with that is that I have no control over the heating as the landlord has set the timer and the boiler door is locked. The heating comes on at five which is understandable because the other people in the flats get home about six. But I get home in the afternoon and yesterday I had the day off. I could see my own breath as I lay on the sofa covered under blankets.

But I would still rather that than have to pay my own heating bill. In a previous place I lived my flatmate would leave the heating on full blast all the time. I would wake up in the morning in a sweat as the heating had been left on all night. Then he wondered why our gas bill clocked in at £265.
It was much better with the previous flatmate when we used to play a game called first one to turn the heating on is a pussy.