Dan Germain

saddle up

I have already featured two stag weekends in my blog - my own and that of my friend Craig (who is  getting married on Friday). And I'm about to feature another. But that will be it for a while. I don't want people to think that I am some sort of stag beast. No. I am much more the debonair and sophisticated wine ponce, as seen here.

Anyway, I saw this post on Nic's site about his stag do and it looks like it was a bit good. In fact, the friend who organised it liked it so much that he is starting to organise them for other people. They're cowboy themed, and you get to ride around the Sierra Nevada (in Spain, not California) pretending to be a cowboy with your mates. Spot on. Tell your friends.

Here endeth posts about stag weekends.

photo of stag from World of Oddy's flickr stream

"a bit like No Diggity by Blackstreet"

"He revealed he had not yet spoken to Dr Dre about the project, but was interested in producing a sound "a bit like No Diggity by Blackstreet"."

Elton John plans hip-hop album. Ouch.

bad vibrations

Murry Wilson was more than an annoying dad. He was pretty nasty to his sons (Brian, Carl and Dennis). Without Murry the Beach Boys wouldn't have existed, but then again, without Murry, they would have been a lot happier in the long run.

I'd never actually heard the bootlegs that were rumoured to exist of a legendary recording session where Murry went a bit mad in the studio...

...until now...

wining old ad man

Now's the bit where I sound like a bit of a ponce. We drank some of this wine at the weekend, from John Hegarty's vineyard (Mr Hegarty is one of the men who set up an ad agency called BBH). Saw it in Oddbins, it had a good recommendation written about it on one of those tickets (I'm a sucker for those recommendations on a ticket) and I bought it. The label is very smart, the wine tasted really good (kind of deep and mossy*), shame about the mildly pretentious French poem thing on the back of the bottle.

Next week - I tell you all about some very strong cheddar cheese that I recently tasted, made on Trevor Beattie's Herefordshire dairy farm.

* ponce

saw a little dickie bird

Actually, I don't know if it was Dickie. The place where we were staying (near Oxford) is quite close to Dickie's house, so perhaps it was him floating past us on Bank Holiday Monday. Was going to shout and ask but I don't reckon he would have heard.

hey chicken

More rubbish videos, this time from Loose Fur, the Tweedy/O'Rourke/Kotche supergroup. Hey Chicken.

muzzle of bees

Back in London after a few days in the countryside. Couldn't park within half a mile of our house due to Notting Hill Carnival (our house is on the fringes of carnival) so had to carry luggage a fair way. Lots of sirens and helicopters going off all around. Welcome home...

I hate to sound so moany and old, but I don't like carnival. It's unnatural. Too many people in one place at one time. And they wonder why there's trouble. I hate it because I never get to meet up with people, I never get to the places I want to be and I usually get an achey hip. It's a thing I get when I walk too much - achey left hip. Not achingly hip. Definitely not that.

If I didn't sound old before, I guess I do now.

Anyway, I soothed myself this evening with a recently discovered Wilco video (should appear below as well). Looks like they saved money and filmed it in Jeff Tweedy's front room. I reckon Tweedy would hate carnival too. He can be pretty grumpy.

life in the middle

Please allow me to introduce Paul's "Life in the Middle" blog.

Paul, or Mr Colman as he is sometimes known, seems like a fine man. He's giving up ribs. He posts all sorts of funny, wise stuff about life, work and running. He's just been on holiday in Ireland.

We haven't met yet but we will soon. You should read his blog if you get a chance.

apple's batteries

More on the Apple battery recall. Apparently things haven't been working too well, as you can read here.

Having said that, I visited the appropriate page, entered my details and it all seemed to work for me, but I've now got to wait 4-6 weeks for the new battery to arrive. Guess I should keep a fire extinguisher handy.

pic from nondeadly's flickr stream

dealing with the heat

I was interested to see how Apple handled the battery recall, so I went to the UK site. No mention on the homepage. I went to the US homepage - still no mention. Even when you click the Hot News (unfortunate name) link, no hot news.

I found this pretty surprising. If, as new stories suggest, the batteries are possibly a danger to loyal Apple customers (arguably the most loyal/evangelical brand advocates in the world), why not let them know in the most obvious and open way, before they burn themselves again?

It wouldn't be difficult. Stick it on the front page. The fact that Sony made the batteries means that Apple could put a little distance between their brand and the problem as well, if they felt that was the right thing to do.

I imagine that they thought about all of this. The 'hot battery' problem has been around for a while, so I guess that they didn't announce the recall until they were ready to deal with the logistics involved.

But Apple seem to have chosen to keep quiet. Indeed, I only found a link to the relevant support page at the bottom of a page on msnbc.com that I found via digg. The support page is good. It does the job. But it's buried, and seeing as this story is on all news programmes everywhere, burying it seems a little daft.

Anyway, I think my battery might be affected - if it is, I'll blog the results of the recall process and we'll see if Apple get it right. And maybe by tomorrow morning they'll have started talking about the problem in a slightly more open fashion.