Bumph Box

In many respects it’s one of the defining moments of any tournament your team plays in. Their first goal. It takes a weight off a nation’s shoulders, settles them down and offers hope for the rest of the tournament. And those who had invested in HD for these very moments, missed it thanks to the shambolic ITV sports team. I don’t care what or who was to blame. If it was a technical fault, how come they don’t have back up plans? this isn’t fucking beta. And I may be paranoid, but the news that Paddy Power offered odds of 8/1 on any game getting interrupted by ads on ITV just seemed too…. Maybe the person in control of the buttons was Scottish or something.

So, The wife returns from a hectic night’s work. Me and the boy need something to do on what plans to be a reasonable day, weather wise. He needs new sand for his sand pit and we need something for dinner later. So there’s a bit of a plan – tie in a visit to the park and I think we have the makings of a day. Just occurred to me, as I don’t really use this blog for that much – maybe I can use it in this way? Just as a daily or so, place for gubbins and ramblings – actually, that’s exactly what it was intended for!

Something really endearing about the I phone. I love the way some apps really appeal. Currently trying out the hipstamatic app which basically does lo fi camera shots with a range of lenses and films. Pretty nifty.

Me and the good wife were browsing the delights of B&M Bargains and the usual piped in tunes were on. It was The flame haired minstrel of soul himself, Mick Hucknall and Simply Red – Holding back the years. Strange I noticed a few pensioner types singing along, wondering if they really like the band or whether it’s the sentiment of the lyrics that hit a chord. The thought then mutated into an image of a massive Simply Red concert full of pensioners all singing along. Heh.

One of Solly’s Christmas presents last year was a JCB toy called Rex the Roller. Once I figured out what it was I got quite excited by the idea that JCB had done a range of toys based on their magical yellow monsters. However, that excitement soon waned as the toy itself was a letdown. No genuine feeling of character with ‘Rex’, shoddy graphics and overall unpleasant plasticness. Add to that an irritating click with each roll and poor geordie dialogue, I think JCB took the cheap route to bringing their agricultural, construction and material handling equipment into our family living rooms. Possibly one of the biggest missed opportunities I can think of. The real equipment had already won us over but now I feel somewhat cheated. Probably not fair to say as I haven’t seen the full range, but this experience has left me feeling that we may look elsewhere for such construction related fun in the future.

Click to hear Rex

I can find no valid argument to defend why I enjoy watching the BDO World Darts Championships on the BBC every January. Yes, it’s darts. Yes, it’s shit. But it’s the way that this shit is presented and hyped that intrigues me so. I could begin the story back in the mid to late 90′s when I wasn’t going through a particularly inspired snippet of life. The mundane, yet ‘real’, nature of the darts, snooker, bowls… even horse racing (my how I now despise horse racing)… take your pick of the BBC sports. This authentic blandness helped me through in some twisted way. I recall a friend during that time, putting the horse racing on the telly ‘for a bit of colour’.

Maybe the story starts a little differently, when the PDC was born and Sky muscled in on the arrows action and stole all the best players. Throwing in their razzamatazz and doing what they could to jazz up the game. While looking tacky and blatantly stupid, it suited the sky audience of the time and left us BDO lakeside viewers wondering what the BBC could come up with. And early doors it wasn’t much. A load of no namers and the eventual winner of the post PDC split, hailing from Canada, John Part, things were looking bleak.

However, the Beeb started getting their act together and took a leaf out of the sky book of spin. the Dart MC’s were getting features, nicknames started becoming the norm – stupid entrances etc etc. At last, I could begin enjoying all the crap that makes the sport so fascinating to watch.

And at the centre of all this spin undoubtedly are the commentators. There isn’t much that makes my soul feel more relaxed than Tony Green doing his best to describe the players wives in the audience during a particularly dull five setter, which seems to make up most of the airtime (or maybe in my head it does).

Check out the Big Train ‘staring championships’ or the more recent (but not as good) Mitchell & Webb snooker commentary before tuning in this Saturday.

So don’t get me wrong. I’m not a fan of the darts as such. But I am fan. people think i’m taking the piss, but i’m not.

Just to keep the content flowing. Been a tad sick over the last few days, reckon it’s that noro virus or whatever it’s called. Nasty thing, violently sick on a few occasions. Glad it’s passed. Been thinking about what I want to do photography wise and I think I might get back into the experimental stuff. The Birmingham wheel is back and that gave me a great subject to try some stuff. Thinking i’m gonna revisit very soon.

Here’s what I did with it before

The We Share Stuff is moving along, probably not as quick as i’d like but that’s to be expected with the time that me and Jon can put into it. We’ve been working on some good projects and making good links along the way so it’s good progress.

I’ll leave it there for now but really need to post more often (note to self: even if you don’t write for others, do it for yourself as a reflective diary thang)

I’m still trying to find the best way to get stuff online. The latest method uses a combo of blogging things. This blog, where general thoughts and other stuff appears and i’ve also started a couple of Tumblrs as a better method of keeping track of stuff i’ve found online. Anyways, for now i’ve split it between a ‘work‘ and a ‘play‘ Tumblr. Pretty self explanatory. Anyways, the links are in the sidebar over there should you wish to see whats happening.

I’ve always found myself needing to make stuff, be it artistically via music or photography. Now that creativity seems to be coming from the business I started. I love meddling with Web stuff and showing people how to do it too. The way the Web evolves, makes it quite a playground to try things and you don’t need to be a boffin to play around with it either. something simple like toying with the bbc homepage or starting a tumblr, to changing a bit of php or creating a pipe. It doesn’t matter what your goal is, you don’t even need one, but if the light switches on for you with this stuff then you’re in for a creative time.