My mobile phone contract runs out today.

Unfortunately, key buttons on my phone stopped working yesterday, so I’ll be trolling down the road to the dealer to get a new phone and another 12 month tie-in.

And a phone whose spec changes ever so slightly by the addition of an ‘i’.

Friday night, P and I had separate engagements. I had a local party annual dinner, he was giving a concert with his madrigal group. We’d both arranged these events months ago, and it wasn’t until we thought to invite each other to the other one’s do that we realised we had a clash.

But the co-incidence came in that the two events were less than 100 metres from each other in a little North Notts village twenty miles north of here that neither of us had heard about until recently. He was in a singing in a church, and I was eating in a pub and listening to Lembit.

The idealistic speechwriter is well-liked by just about everyone. He’s known for his excellent writing, sense of humor, and tendency to be clutzy. Although being younger than the rest of the staff, he’s often treated as so, much to his dismay.

:: Which West Wing character are you? ::

<Via>

My ‘Niles @ Styles’ project comes to its conclusion.

I have now recorded the entire book, Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Affair at Styles. I’ve edited the recordings into some sort of shape, all I have to do now is upload them to the librivox guys for further dissemination. And tag them so that my faithful listeners get their copies automatically.

I have had the word ‘disambiguate’ floating around in my head for about a week now. You would be amazed at how many chances I’ve had to slip it casually into conversation. Literally three. Seamlessly. And in only two cases did I get a filthy look. Lots of good big words at group tonight. Many of which I’ve forgotten already, but ‘antediluvian’ kinda sticks in the mind. Even if it wasn’t quite a nice thing for someone to say about my car when I was offering them a lift home.

I’ve also been trying to use the elephant gag for about the same length of time. No-one will play ball with me in conversation.

It goes like this: it’s raining. You don’t have a coat or brolly, so you say you’ll just have to do what elephants do when it rains. What’s that, enquires your hapless interlocutor (Ah, mish interlocutor…). Get wet, you respond drily.

How we laughed.

Here’s one for all you trendy young things: a ten second snippet of Dead Like Me Series 1 Episode 14 with a song that I keep hearing and cannot identify. I’ve played it loads of people, I’ve described the track, and people have come up with other songs with similar words, but not this one.

It’s all the things I like in a song! Slow, sad, good backing vocals, eminently hummable.

So what is it?!

A-boom boom bah!

EDIT: Thanks to Will who has correctly identified it as Boom boom ba by Métisse. Will, I’m impressed your hearing is good enough to pick out the lyrics from behind the dialogue. Nothing I could actually hear was likely to be unique to a particular song.

Rob: The Shazam link looks fascinating, I’m tempted to use the thing just for the pure technology even though I now know what the song is.

And a final point — this song appears on the sound track for the movie, The Next Best Thing, the Madonna slash Rupert Everett gay slash straight slash parenting flick that was seminal to my MA thesis on on heterosociality. Which is probably where I’ve heard the song before, and probably, when it cropped back up again, why it sounded like something I ought to get to know. Certainly better than Madge’s rendition of American Pie.

Here’s one for all you trendy young things: a ten second snippet of Dead Like Me Series 1 Episode 14 with a song that I keep hearing and cannot identify. I’ve played it loads of people, I’ve described the track, and people have come up with other songs with similar words, but not this one.

It’s all the things I like in a song! Slow, sad, good backing vocals, eminently hummable.

So what is it?!

A-boom boom bah!

EDIT: Thanks to Will who has correctly identified it as Boom boom ba by Métisse. Will, I’m impressed your hearing is good enough to pick out the lyrics from behind the dialogue. Nothing I could actually hear was likely to be unique to a particular song.

Rob: The Shazam link looks fascinating, I’m tempted to use the thing just for the pure technology even though I now know what the song is.

And a final point — this song appears on the sound track for the movie, The Next Best Thing, the Madonna slash Rupert Everett gay slash straight slash parenting flick that was seminal to my MA thesis on on heterosociality. Which is probably where I’ve heard the song before, and probably, when it cropped back up again, why it sounded like something I ought to get to know. Certainly better than Madge’s rendition of American Pie.