Marketing digital radio to the ladies?

I'm not sure I want one of these, from the latest catalogue of those fine purveyors of gold-plated hi-fi leads, Russ Andrews:

My new record label

Hello everyone. Sorry I've been so quiet, but I've been in Australia and all that.

I've also been working very hard on releasing the first CD on my new label, Quincunx Sound Recordings. The CD is called First Time Ever I Saw Your Face by Kommando Raumschiff Zitrone,the duo of Kai Fagaschinski and Christof Kurzmann. Copies are available from Sound 323 at the bargain price of £9.99 or, if you want a special WPG Lock In discount, directly from me. Contributors to WPG get a free copy if they ask.

An appeal for sanity...

The Lock-in is the place for drunken rants. While the sun is not yet over the yard-arm (well, we'll give it a couple more minutes), I am ready to rant about the London free newspaper war.

In a bid to walk off at least one or two of the beer-related calories, I am now walking from Liverpool Street to Regulator Towers each morning and back again in the evening. The morning stroll is pleasant enough, but the afternoon jaunt is now a constant fight against distributors of London Lite and the rival thelondonpaper trying to thrust their wares into your hands. Now, I'm all for something for nothing, and I don't actually mind thelondonpaper, despite its hilarious Pete Doherty/P Diddy confusion. But the distributors, particularly around Bank station, are literally on every corner. On Friday, I counted them, and in my twenty minute walk, there were twelve free newspaper people. And that's not counting the suicidal looking Evening Standard (50p!) vendors... It's got to the point where I'm missing being harrassed by the chuggers at London Bridge tube.

So, an open appeal to Associated and NewsCorp: while I applaud the thorough nature of your distribution plans, please stop this freebie madness!

Man of the Pies

I walked past this van last week, and thought of Dave.



If I ever have an event that needs caterers, this is the man I'll be calling...

Fame at last II

This week's Now magazine and who is that slightly grubby looking journalist interviewing Martin Fowler off of EastEnders and the other actress whose name I can't remember?

Me (pictured left, with someone else), that's who. I don't have very pretty legs and now one of them has appeared in a national celebrity magazine. That's not good, is it?

Will writes:
And here is that offending picture. I hadn't seen this posting last night, and TCMJ and I spent the train journey home trying to work out whether it was indeed Lord Wallis of Walton-on-Thames...



Image courtesy: whoever left Now Magazine on the 2300 to Ipswich.

What are the chances of that?

So there I was, in Hamleys yesterday. And who should I bump into but Emily Dubberly!

Despite the fact she supposedly lives in Brighton, there she was, in Hamleys. She gave me her tiny card (how trendy) which appears to take into account the fact she now seems to have two surnames.

Anyway, we had a chat about what she was up to and the fact she was mentioned on our blog and given that she now seems to write about sex for every major magazine publication going, she has provisionally agreed to be a sex correspondent for us too.

When I say "provisionally", I mean it in a made up and untrue sense, but I thought it would be fun to have a sex correspondent for the beer guide, given the two are usually mutually exclusive.

Although a lot of people supposedly conceive when they're drunk... not that gracefully, I would imagine...

The Dubbmeister

I bumped into Emily when we were both doing a paper review on BBC LDN. She had just started at Scarlet and was still as certifiable as ever.

We discovered we lived two streets away from each other in Willesden and she invited me to her NY party.

Whilst I was interested in the prospect of meeting a bunch of women working on a magazine which appears to be mainly about masturbation, I decided instead to move to Surrey as quickly as possible.

1990's humour

... alive and well in the North East.


Swinhoe, Northumbria.

Fame at last

i've made it onto a guardian weblog!

Not only that, the author (an old friend of John Peel, 6 Music broadcaster extraordinaire and writer of that classic hit "2-4-6-8 Motorway") actually had to tell me about it and then send me the link before I got round to reading it.

This got me thinking - if we go out and tell people about Will's Pub Guide, put photos of them in it and then force them to read our articles, we'll get more hits!

Good luck with the move Will. I'll be thinking of you. And probably coming to stay during the V festival if that's alright.

Poodle perms

Hello

I had lunch with three people from work on Thursday at Regents Park.

It was, as those of you based in the South East may have noticed, quite hot that day.

Once settled on a patch of grass, one of the girls we were with announced she was going to remove her trousers, which she did. She was wearing a dress, which covered most of her modesty, so there you go.

Then the other girl we were with announced she was going to remove her dress, which she did, stripping off to her bra and knickers.

Kev and I choked on our drinks and protested (but not very hard, obviously) that you can't just take your dress off in front of your work colleagues.

She argued that it was hot, we were in a park and anyway - it wasn't like she was wearing a thong or anything.

Fair enough, I thought, maybe I'm just being prudish.

It was still weird, though.

'ello princess

I (pictured left) would like to claim the first person who isn't known to Will posting to the New Will's Pub Guide.

Check out the comment to my pictorial review of the Minnow in Weybridge.

I believe this is the first random since that lady from O'Neill's Challenged Will.

Although "princess" can't be that random - if you google "minnow weybrdige" the guide doesn't get a look in.

Interestingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, if you google "minnow weybridge will's pub guide" it comes top, which at least means google is aware of Will's Home Page, even if no one else is.

Whilst we're on the subject, if you google "will's pub guide" you still get the old guide. This is pretty crap. Can we attempt to get more people to link to Will's Pub Guide (the new one) so it comes higher up in Google searches? Or is that not the way to do it?

How do we go about doing this? Do we have a web guru that can sort us on this?

URE Training Day 1999

Will's "friend"! Garders' hair! One of the all-time "big pint" greats!
It could only be, retrieved from the vaults (well, my loft), the URE Training Day 1999!

Radio Crimes: 18th Birthday, March 1989

Finally, an eight-page Radio Crimes special to celebrate URE's coming-of-age, from March 1989.

More URE archive

And yet more. This time, it's lots of officious letters I wrote when I was Programme Controller. I was a precocious git, wasn't I? And nothing changes...

Radio Crimes: Freshers Week 1988

Well, that seemed to work. So here's more from the Hall of Fame. Or rather, shame.

URE History

Here's a bit of radio history - this is the first edition of URE's programme schedule, Radio Crimes, that I appeared in, in 19yadayadayada.
If this works as I hope, you should be able to click on them to make them full size so you can read them. More will follow...

Working the night shift

It is not unknown for people round here, when the work in hand is done, and things have gone a bit quiet, to toddle off into a quiet corner and grab a few zees.

Prime locations include the sofas that can be found in the glass cube management offices which are dotted about the place.

Recently a snotty email went round from a manager complaining that someone had been sleeping on her office sofa, and could the perpertrator(s) desist.

Within twelve hours a response came round from one of the oldest lags on the nightshift to the effect that some woman had been working in his bedroom during the day. He'd been putting up with it so far, but was starting to find it a bit intrusive.

I await further developments with interest.

A pint of your finest Puppy

Next time you're in York and fancy a pint of Yorkshire Terrier, bear in mind you may be taken literally.

I suspect this beer's from Canada, as this glass appears to contain a Labrador.

There's plenty more of this rubbish on www.cuteoverload.com

Now does this mean...

... that IPods are truly great, or that students really aren't what they used to be? (Or does typing that last sentence make me really old?!)

Survey: iPods More Popular Than Beer
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Move over Bud.
College life isn't just about drinking beer. In a rare instance, Apple Computer Inc.'s iconic iPod music player surpassed beer drinking as the most "in" thing among undergraduate college students, according to the latest biannual market research study by Ridgewood, N.J.-based Student Monitor.
More from The Washington Post/AP.

Now that's what I call...

...a bonus.

Soca Warriors on the World Cup's Most Unusual Win Bonus
A win against England in Thursday's Group B encounter will see the 23 Trinidad & Tobago players, and their coach, celebrate in style when they return to their homeland. Angostura Rum, the national drink of the islanders, has promised to give the most historic barrels of rum it owns to the players if they can score three points in the crucial World Cup game.

As always, the devil is in the detail...
the 24 Angostura Rum casks, which each hold 247 litres of undiluted spirit...
247 litres - each! Crikey.