Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

The final A-Soc social of the summer ended on a rather good note with 17 people turning up. We were yet again screwed over by the union but never the less things proceeded well with us re-grouping in The Old Bar for a night of good fun that didn’t end until gone midnight.

Especially given Nicola and Zoltan were at a gig, Moz is in Europe, Rich is missing in action, Bo was on a date, Gijsbert has just disappeared, Brett couldn’t make it down, Rosie is in America Bevis couldn’t make it either. These are just A-Soc hardcores if you also add people like Oli, Chinese Matt and Charlie we did fantastically to say so many people weren’t there.

Roll on freshers’ week!

Saturday night having come round again, Michelle and Norm’s joint party (that Norm didn’t have any say in and couldn’t actually come to 😉 ) had arrived.

Being unable to get the time off work I didn’t finish until late and given an unending series of problems ending with the building alarm refusing to set leaving us waiting around for the morning shift to turn up I didn’t make it to the party until gone 3am.

I was greeted by a rather drunk Moz who seemed rather pleased to see me. As pre-arranged with Nicola (who was passed out on the couch) I tried to take her up but she was a little too drunk to stay conscious for more than 20-30 seconds at a time. For someone who is such an outgoing party animal she’s quite a light weight (though to be fair she had, had a long day and is keeping up with me for hours at work at the moment).

The real winner of the evening was the amount of drunken stories that emerged that night and the next morning. Always entertaining.

Oh, we’re still alive btw. You win again, science!

Last night saw another A-Soc summer social. I arrived for the commitee meeting to find the union was locked down for a commerical event, of course, they didn’t bother to let us know. Not only could we not get in The Terrace but they actually closed down the front of the union and just presumed people would find their way to The Old Bar. Luckily the bouncer was kind enough to point people in our direction so it wasn’t a total write off.

We archived a nice healthy 16 people to the meeting and the preceeding committee meeting was attended by twice as many commitee members as last week so things looked fairly good. I think we’ll chalk another line on the old success tally for this week.

The early hours of Friday morning saw my new podcast launch onto the world wide web!

The first episode recorded by myself, Moz, Liz and Fonze is, as with all the episodes, officially about “religion” nut completely off topic constantly. From now on a new episode will appear each Friday and judging my the standards of last night they are going to get better and better as we go along.

You can find the podcast on my website and there is also an RSS feed so you can subscribe with RSS readers, iTunes, etc.

Having said all that, I didn’t watch a lot of the Olympics mainly because it just annoyed me. We seem to have been a bit too happy, smiley, everything is fine with China. Let’s review a few of the news stories that came out during the games.

The fireworks were pre-recorded.

Nobody turned up so they rounded up groups of students to make the stadiums look full.

To construct the new venues they bulldozed people’s houses with compensation.

People’s families suffered due to the people being involved in the games being taken away to camps so they couldn’t look after their families.

The fancy trains that said “made in China” on them were actually made by a company in Canada – who were ordered to de-badge them and put “made in China” on them in an attempt to stop people associating said term with crap quality. When in fact, of course, it is, hence why they went to Canada for their trains.

They spent a third of their GDP on the games, rather than feed their people.

They decided the young girl who was singing was too ugly so they hid her behind a curtain and put a better-looking girl out there miming.

They managed to perform the closing ceremony without using any amplification on the drums.

They had people carrying “nothing to see here” boards on standby as seen when the Hungarian weightlifter bent his arm back.

Their no doubt equal and fair selection process for the hundreds of people dancing in the stadium somehow presented any overweight or even slightly imperfect people from appearing.

Finally, the coordinator for the ending ceremony of the Olympic games said the western world couldn’t do amazing ceremonies like China did because…

• We respect human rights
• We have no dicipline and stop every 15 minutes for coffee breaks
• We only work 4 and a half days a week
• We aren’t willing to suffer enough
• However he does complement North Korea on their ability to stage such performances.

Did I miss anything?

There are a few things I want to talk about here. We need rather well I thought. Russia beat us to 3rd place in end but but 4th for Britain is really good, after all if there is one thing we are good at it is losing at sports.

Anyway, syncronised diving. It’s not a real sport is it? I mean seriously, you’r just jumping into a pool at the same time. It’s not big and it’s not clever. It’s very good to do at some kind of swimming club with 7 year old kids but an olympic sport? Of course not.

Also, London 2012, how are we supposed to follow this? Well anyway it’s irrelevant as we’re not even going to try. There is already talk of how we are going to hold a more “intimate” games, which basically just means less impressive.

And what was our closing ceremony about? It did have some rather nice features but it was spoilt for me by the fact that the big red bus we had, turned up on time. I don’t really feel that sums up British culture. Oh and the commentator accidentally called Leona Lewis a “superstar.” Finally, in case we hadn’t lost all self respect we ended it with “here’s David Beckham, he’s not going to say anything we’re just showing off.”

Finally, I just want to be clear that the man we sent to represent us in front of the rest of the world – was Boris Johnson. Kept him away from Britain for a while I guess. It’s good to see I’m not the only person who actually uses my jacket pockets.

Good stuff.

I went out on Friday for John’s birthday at which there was also in attenance quite a few people I knew from high school. Sometimes you really don’t appreciate your life and what you have achieved until you meet up with your former peers and compare. There is just something nice about being able to take a deep breath and think to yourself, “I am such a better human being than you.” Good times :D.

Friday saw our long time coming (though possibly not so awaited) house warming.

I never really put much thought to it, I’m not even sure I got round to inviting people and was quite suprised when quite a number of people began to tell me throughout the week that they would see me at the party on Friday.

Still Friday having arrived it was all but dead until 10:30. Still with Kieran having turned up all the way from London, a few other select guests and there being plenty of alcohol in the house, we had sufficent company and drink to make it a good night anyway. Not that it was a problem was once the night drew on the guests began to flood in.

The party ended up going on till around 5am before the approaching daylight sent us running for cover. Not too bad for a group of suburbian based OAPs ;).

Nothing happened.