Why?

Awww

Why does it always rain on fireworks?
Is it because they lied when they were 17?

Why would the ratings of Buzzcocks be going down? It's fantastic even without the magnificence of St Bill. I love Simon Amstell, he's both adorable and incredibly good at inoffensively taking the complete piss out of people. He nearly made Danny Dyer cry, which is something I would pay good money to see. As is the sight of Jack Dee doing a very David Brent-esque dance thing for the intros round. I forget which episode was on when, I think I'm up to date, live TV eludes me, but sometime recently they also had the very lovely Chris Addison on. I'm guessing by the fact that it's on in the Thursday 9pm slot that it's not for the axe but I have palpitations at the thought of no more Buzzcocks.

Why does my hair look like it sparkles when my 41 year old brother and 68 year old mother aren't going grey? Why do people think it's ok to say it looks like highlights? Why would I get white highlights on almost black hair? Why do I care? Why do I spend vast amounts of time and effort (and a small amount of money as I'm too tight to get the hairdresser to do it properly - it costs me enough for a cut never mind anything posh) making it look not quite like it did when I was 17? Does that make it rain on fireworks?

Why am I awake?

Why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near? You too can have the hits of the Carpenters on repeat in your head. I'm on the top of the world looking down on creation and I guess I've always known I'd say goodbye to love. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. God, even my subconscious has terrible taste in music, I've got Magic fm on the brain. There must be a treatment for that?

Why are all the first lines of Shakespeare the well known ones? What's wrong with the second and subsequent lines?

"If music be the food of love play on"

"In sooth, I know not why I am so sad"

Other ones, including the vastly overquoted: "Who's there", that I remembered earlier but don't now, possibly because of the time.

I hated Shakespeare at school, and I've recently discovered that he was a genius rather than a bore. I love the fact that if he didn't have a word that fitted, he made one up. His knowledge was pretty astounding for the time; even if inaccurate, to know of the existence of all the things he wrote about was damned impressive.

Why the over analysis though? People do it to lyrics too. Any time I've written a song/poem, which has only ever been done as parody but are *obviously* of equal standard, the words chosen are the ones that fit the rhythm and that have the right sound. I remember Fran from Travis saying that the line "pillars into butter" started off as "caterpillars into butterflies" but it didn't fit, so they chopped it. Yet there's been loads of speculation as to the meaning behind pillars and butter. There is none. Michael Stipe said something similar about taking random words out to make them fit. And Brandon Flowers said on the dancer thing that it was about Hunter S Thompson's comment about a nation of dancers, which he liked and used, but he didn't really think about what it meant, he just liked it. It fitted the song. That's what lyrics do. Yeah, there's usually a meaning to the song, but the stuff that doesn't make sense isn't usually deep and meaningful, it just fits.

Oh, that was going to be a moan about Saturday nights and being old and stuff, but I remembered I'm actually going out next Saturday. As I've failed to make it to Manchester in far too long, the residents of Manchester (not all of them) are obligingly coming up to go out in Glasgow which is positively marvellous.

I have 14 minutes remaining. I think I'd better stop writing.

Adieu.

Notes from a small neuron

It's a kitten. Love me.

After much delay, caused by inefficient websites, not being in America and general mistrust by me, I managed to get ereader on my phone, and free ebooks to read. Limited selection till I find a new version of drop-a-book and nab some text files from Project Guttenberg, but I do now have Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde, Little Women, Oliver Twist and most importantly The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I haven't read in, ouch, too many years (25?) and feel I want to read now given the sheer greatness of the author. Also, my brain is much smaller than it used to be and I think children's books are probably just about perfect for gentle reading. A nice little collection of childhood memories there, I'm on a big trip down memory lane today for some reason.

Huge tangent: why a trip down memory lane?

The wonder that is Facebook is causing me to undo the years of damage that my appalling skills of keeping in touch have ravaged upon my friendships. Facebook is strange, it's not like the other social networking sites. I had a mini-cull a few weeks ago and deleted all the "unreal" people that I don't actually know (probably after some hissy fit) and I'm completely unsearchable, so it's relatively "safe". Anyway, I have as my friends on there, my family, my closest friends, my internet only friends, my more distant relatives and increasingly, the friends I had lost altogether. Pretty much everyone I know apart from the ones that don't "do" Facebook. You see who's friends with who, and spot a familiar name and then off you go. Today I was accepted by a girl who was my closest friend when we were about 13. I haven't seen her since we were about 15 and she moved to Australia, and we haven't spoken in just about as long, just because we haven't. It got me to thinking how very strange it is how you can see someone every day and know everything about them, and then end up leading entirely different lives just like that. That can be poised on a precipice of depressing thoughts about how much more interesting everyone else's lives ended up, and I'm still here stagnating in the same stupid town, but I'm not going there. Still on Facebook, I did a couple of the inane quizzes about 70s/80s things. These are infuriating as they are compiled by the sort of person that compiles a quiz on Facebook, I think anyone can, so you get questions wrong that you know are right, just because the compiler was a moron.

He-man, Marathons, Top Deck... Do I remember who this was? Uh, yeah.

My first crush. I have about twenty minutes worth of memories of being at nursery and most of those are about the day the Green Cross Code Man came in to give us a talk on safety. I think it may have even been David Prowse himself which makes me feel quite giddy thinking about it. This may have been where my heightism came from: he's 6'7. Uh oh, giddy again. If only one of my nieces was here to say "my giddy aunt", it would be ever so apt.

(I believe he was also in some film or other that was quite well known but he's the Green Cross Code Man to me. Ok?)

Back on track: on the first page of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain says "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot".

I actually love him. In a way. For a person that's been dead for nearly 100 years and entirely based on what he wrote. But still love.

I'm taking him/my phone to bed now. My cup overfloweth.