It’s been bloody years since I did karaoke last, and so with the recent arrival of my birthday I decided that the arbitrary forced bit of levity I wanted to inflict on the world was a singing extravaganza the likes of which they’d never experienced.
However, it turns out it’s a little more challenging than that to get British people to do karaoke.
Not that it was ever something which we did in massive amounts back in Adelaide, but the few times I’ve done it I remembered it being quite some fun: …

Going back a few years when Brian & Olivia still lived in the fair town of London, we had a nice little get together involving a few vino rossos, a healthy amount of the talking of bullshit, and for some reason which now escapes me, the giving of some gifts.  Was it Christmas?  Hanged if I can remember.  But that’s hardly the point.
Catrin bestowed on me the utterly practical gift of a set of Reservoir Ducks: a gaggle of plastic ducks sporting ties and dark glasses (and only a natty …

Wow.  I just checked to see what blog entries I’d left unfinished lately, and spotted one from early May detailing how I’d been too busy to write about anything and giving dotpoints of the sort of thing that’s been going on round here.
Of course, as is now plainly obvious, I’ve been so busy I haven’t had a chance to finish the post.
There you go – self-referential supporting evidence.
Now – HTC Desire, or iPhone 4?

Getting out to London’s former Millennium Dome – now ambiguously named “The O2″, like a selection of other venues around the continent – is always an exercise carried out with a sense of wistful resignation.  You know there’s nothing empirically good to do out there, and there’s the vague likelihood that it’ll be unecessarily difficult to get back again if everything doesn’t go EXACTLY to plan.  However it is one of London’s only 20,000+ seater venues, and they keep putting the big gigs on there.  So when one manages to …

I tell ya what, if ever you’re feeling short of the luuuurve I can definitely recommend signing up with a Facebook account, and having a birthday.  My inbox today looks a little like this:
You guys seriously rock.  It’s humbling, and you’re all awesome.  And it’s gonna take ages to respond to each one, but y’know – me’ mum taught me to be polite.
Special mention to Douggy for the best gift (so far) today: this handsome Virtual Spatula.