Category Archives: Uncategorized

Wedding Frenzy!

I’m in the midst of a wedding frenzy at the moment… Last weekend, I flew to San Francisco for a couple of nights for Melissa & Jonas’ wedding, which was a lot of fun — plus it was great to see most of my SF friends again.

Tonight I’m flying to the UK overnight, less than two days after getting back from SF, for two MORE weddings! My little sister Vicki is marrying her partner Steve on Thursday in Sheffield, and then I’m back down to London for Stuart & Becky’s wedding next Saturday.

That’s 3 weddings in 8 days, and about 13,500 air miles in total!

I hate TicketMaster!

I’ve ranted about TicketMaster’s price gouging in the past (see blog passim), but my blood is boiling once more from a fresh outrage, so I need to vent once again…

I’m trying to buy myself a ticket for An Evening with P J Harvey at the Beacon Theatre on 10 October, and the cheapest tickets at this all-seater theatre are $35. That seems pretty reasonable to me, since that money pays both the venue, all the road crew and an artist who I’ve wanted to see for some years.

However, the only way to buy a ticket without physically going to the box office is through TicketGouger — and they will add on an additional $9.60 “convenience fee,” and then on top of that, another “just because we can” $3.15 “order processing fee”! This amounts to $12.75 — 36.5% of the ticket’s cover value!

How can these fuckers justify this breathtaking level of extortion? If both the theatre and the artist can make money from $35 for actually doing something worthwhile (and probably quite costly to put on), how much profit are TicketGouger raking in for running a ticket ordering website, mailing tickets out and generally treating their customers with absolute contempt?

This time, I’m not going to be held to ransom — I’m going to buy my tickets at the box office on principle.

Lord of my Domain?

I’m in the process of switching the domain registrar for tonygill.com from enameco.com to godaddy.com (since at $7.15 for a year’s registration they’re less than half the price), but there may be a little time delay before the domain forwarding is set up properly — so if you try to e-mail me and it bounces, please let me know by forwarding the entire bounced message to TONYGILL99 (at) earthlink (dot) net.

Splinter

Yesterday morning, as I was making breakfast, I got a wood splinter in the tip of the middle finger of my left hand from one of my kitchen cabinets that, try as I might, I could not get out. I tried squeezing my finger and digging around with a pair of tweezers, but all to no avail.

Since I was late for work, I gave up eventually, thinking that the splinter would probably work it’s way to the surface in time anyway.

But it didn’t. It continued to cause me pain, and to make common daily activities such as typing painful. Finally tonight I turned to t’Internet in desperation, and of course found exactly what I was looking for: Instructions, including a video, on how to remove a splinter.

And it worked! The splinter is out, at last.

This is England

Last week I saw “This is England,” a great movie by Shaun Meadows about skinhead culture in Britain in the early eighties, and was struck by how much it reminded me of Letchworth, the town in Hertfordshire where I grew up (it was especially poignant because I saw the movie with Johnny D., who also grew up with me in Letchworth, so we were able to reminisce about our shared childhood memories of skinheads roaming the streets, with Stanley knives at the ready, after the movie).

It’s often difficult to imagine the violent youth subculture in small, leafy towns like Letchworth; but here’s a (somewhat sarcastic) quote about gun crime in Letchworth from today’s Channel 4 Snowmail:

Hertfordshire shootings
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And it ain’t only Liverpool/Manchester/London. Because today, the day after Rhys Jones was killed, several people were injured in a gunfight in that well-known urban gangland hell-hole….er… Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire.

This shooting has also now made the BBC national news: Six held after man shot in face

Land of Milk & Honey?

Today I awoke to discover that I had only enough milk for coffee, but not enough for a bowl of cereal (Kashi Autumn Wheat is my cereal of choice at the moment) for breakfast.

“No problem,” I thought to myself, “I’ve got bread, I’ll have toast with butter and honey.”

I then proceeded to drop both slices of toast on the floor — and of course both slices landed butter-and-honey side down.