Twitter Tourette's

True to form it took me a while to come around to the benefits of the social network phenomenon that is Twitter. I joined Myspace just as everyone was jumping ship and joining Facebook. I eventually followed them onto Facebook which I was happy to do as Myspace was and advertising board from which you would receive constant spam from. No I don’t want to see your band play tonight as I live on the other side of the world to Wellington New Zealand.

Then Twitter came along and celebrity’s were doing this thing called tweeting, which consisted of minute by minute updates about being stuck in a lift or something. So naturally I held back for a while.
Then I joined up and realised that its great to get up to date news and opinions about stuff I’m into. That and I don’t get status updates from someone that I hardly new at school about what their kid is doing.

So I’m a convert but I’ve had to have a massive cull of people who spam too much or have tweet tourettes.
So now I don’t follow any comedians. You would think they would be good to follow but it seems like they don’t have anything to do all day apart from tweet every ten minutes and self publicise. Following Ricky Gervais was the tipping point.
It should be140 characters, not 640 characters split over ten tweets.

Best Bad Covers on YouTube

When I have a day off work I always have a slight hang over. Usually just a tinge of a headache but enough to make me not want to do too much in the morning apart from make tea and coffee and watch stuff on my laptop. Sometime’s I might watch a film or a documentary but most of the time I’m more likely to skip around YouTube. Usually I won’t even watch a whole video, its like my fragile hung over brain has the attention span of a child who’s just scoffed back a bag of Haribo.
Today’s skip around was bad cover versions. Its an old favourite of mine.
Here are some of the best bad covers:

Sweet Child O’Mine from a young shirtless band in a rehearsal room.
The song starts with an out of tune interpretation of the well known Slash riff but for some reason the drummer feels the need to count him in. Then the drums and bass enter the song in the wrong place and all three of them manage to play the whole song a bar or two ahead of each other.



Comfortably Numb by a band on a stage at a small town benefit show or something.
You don’t expect a young teenage band who’ve only been playing their instruments for a few weeks to have it together but this band are not young at all. Maybe the band is just a bit of a laugh, but they don’t seem to be having a lot of fun up there.



Smells Like Teen Spirit at a school assembly. Another drummer counts in when the song starts on its own. I love the mangled solo on this and the ending of the song when amp stops working and the singer is giving it her all as she rolls around on the floor.



Why play one song badly when in three minutes you can ruin a handful of songs with A Metal Medley. The band that consists of a drummer, bassist, two singers and a mosh pit that’s playing to a disinterested audience. One of the singers gives a pre song speech that ends with her saying “With metal anything is possible.”
Then near the end for some reason one of the moshers starts doing a Russian Kozak dance.

Crap Covers On YouTube

Today I came across a website devoted to bad cover versions. Take a look at Robbie Williams doing Blur’s Song 2. Yeah Robbie you are so RAWW N’ ROLL! Ha, it’s so so bad. Then there's Peter Gabriel’s version of Radiohead’s Street Spirit (Fade Out). What a painful listen that is. Sure it’s good to take a song in a different direction, but Gabriel has taken it to the vets to have it put down. Gabriel's latest album is all cover songs done in this sparse style. Think I will give it a miss. But then Peter Gabriel has always been crap to me, what with him dressing up as a flower in crap prog rockers Genesis and then that annoying song Solsbury Hill. He rides around on a bike when he sings it live. How shit is that.

So I looked around to find some crap covers and I came across a version of Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues done by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It starts with a drum solo which is never a good thing. Then they all come in with their funk and Anthony Kiedis does that crap faux rapping that he specialises in. Still, makes a bit more sense than his own lyrics.
But then I clicked onto the Alanis Morissette's version. It’s even worse. The Dylan version was the perfect take, it's one of them songs that should be left alone.



Then I looked around for some crap cover versions by unknown or bands. There are just too many, especially the bedroom guitarists that post up anything. Sometimes they’re just badly strumming away the basic chords while the song is playing in the background. “Yes! I’ve just learnt the intro to Come As You Are, I‘m going to post it up on YouTube!”

Too Much Information

Everyone on facebook has ‘friends’ on there who are nothing of the sort. I have people I went to school with and have never seen since or would never care to see again. And a few friends of a friend who I met at a party once. In fact I would probably cross the road if I saw them coming my way so I don’t feel like I have to stop and say hello and ask how they are and they say good and they ask how I am and I say yeah I’m good. Then stand there having nothing to say, and as I don’t care what they have to say we say ‘well see you later then.’

None of my real friends play Farmville or Mafia Wars or Pet whatever it‘s fucking called.
None of my real friends give a mundane running commentary on their life with update’s every couple of hours.
None of my real friends constantly tell everyone what their kid is doing. ‘My little man went to the toilet all by himself!!! I am so proud of him.'
None of my real friends take pictures of the dinner they just cooked and post it up.
None of my real friends status updates are crap poetry that they’ve just written.
None of my real friends take a camera with them every fucking time that they go anywhere and put them up on face book the next day. It’s like it didn’t happen if their isn’t any photographic evidence. They are tagged in about two thousand pictures. Think I’m tagged in about thirty five.
None of my real friends just constantly moan in their status updates. Maybe there’re just looking for sympathy. Well sorry but you won’t find it hear. No, but it does make me laugh. One girl especially. She constantly updates, and the updates are a running commentary on her life combined with whinging.
I know so much about her yet I’ve only met her a handful of times. She gives away way too much information. Like saying she’s had enough of the pills that the doctor is prescribing her and she thinks it’s time for some professional help. Too much information. You don’t constantly have to be an open book.
Another update was a rant about how much she hates her job and her colleagues. Then at the end she adds that she also has the worst period ever. Too much information.
I could delete her as a friend but I read all her updates and all the comments because they crack me up. She is totally devoid of humour but she’s unintentionally making me laugh.

Right, I’m hungry think I’m going to make a cheese and marmite sandwich, but first I need to find my camera.

Doctor Google

I went to the doctors last week, to sort out my rash. It flares up in red blotches over my chest, shoulders and arms when it’s hot. Yes I know it’s winter. But you dress for winter, go out to work or somewhere and the heating is up full blast.
I sweat easily. It’s a running joke at work. I ride into work and when I get there I usually have quite a sweat going on.
“He can’t help it, he’s a very sweaty person,” a colleague of mine always used to call out to me first thing. He wasn’t best pleased when one day my response was “Yeah that’s what your mum said when I banged her last night.”
Quite possibly the first time I had used a your mum joke since school. He hasn’t said it since.

So I go to the doctors I tell him about the rash and take off my shirt to show him. He looks at it curiously and for some reason asks if he can take a picture of it. For his studies and teachings I guess. He goes on his computer and does a bit of research. I see him typing stuff into Google, then he has a look at Google images and there are pictures that look similar to the one that he took of me.
“Yes this looks like it,” he says and tells me the name of the condition which is some long name that I wouldn’t be able to pronounce if held at gun point.
He reads a bit more about it and tells me that it’s usually occurs in hot climates.
Maybe I should move to Siberia.
It takes years to get the qualifications to be a doctor. Or just search around a bit on Goole. Still, I’m not complaining as the cream he prescribed to me sorted out the rash in a couple of days.