Everything Reviewed

Review: Reaching 40,000 on my hit counter

Size isn't everything, apart from when it's the size of your soul, man, or the size of a malignant tumour, or the size of the number of hits that have hit the hit counter of your hit blog. Nearly 40,000! And only some of those (say, 5,000 maximum) are me admiring my own work! Many hits, for example, are directly attributable to my mother, my aunt, my grandfather, and perhaps even the odd brain-damaged boy who has taken an interest. I would like to thank you all. I wouldn't be here* without you.

Reaching 40,000 on my hit counter: It may take weeks, but I have faith. 9 out of 10.

*Editing a report about infectious diseases in an office with grey carpets, sickly lighting, and a lovely but essentially useless view of St Paul's out of the window on the other side from mine.

posted by Eskimo @ 6:27 pm 9 comments

Review: Meeting the famous

Meeting the famous makes ordinary, unfamous people do stupid things. If meeting the famous were an age, it would be three or four years old - past the canonical babbling stage but still retaining the tendency to fall over and/or wet yourself at the drop of a hat. If it were a foodstuff, it would be something exciting but nutritionally empty, like salami or a CheezeString. If it were an actress acting in The Vagina Monologues and talking about what her vagina would say if it could talk, then it would report that its vagina would say something totally unsexy like, "I really admire your work" or "Whoops! Dropped my drink." (Someone should make a riposte to The Vagina Monologues called The Silence of the Vaginas.)

I met Patti Smith the other day - not properly, I didn't bump into her at the supermarket or anything, I was at a festival and she'd just played - and I said some really embarrassing things, most of which I won't go into here, but at one point I said something totally stupid that I didn't even mean ("I feel like I'm talking to God"), and afterwards I felt ashamed of myself and my thoughts turned to my own stupid simile. If I had been talking to God, I hope I would have come up with something better than "Lots of people think you're great!" or "I really think it's brilliant how you made the heaven and the earth and, yea, divided the firmament from the waters and saw that it was good." God would be all like, "Yeah, I know." If you had one question to ask God* - I should point out that I'm an atheist - but if God existed and you had one question to ask him, clearly you'd screw it up and say something along the lines of, "Isn't this just the coolest thing ever?" "No," God would say, and there you'd be, hands in pockets, looking kind of shifty and feeling bad about yourself.

I was in the same room as Jude Law the other day (it was a crowded room. We weren't having sex. I don't think he was aware that I was in the same room as him) and the crowd was pretty equally divided between people pretending they hadn't noticed him and girls walking past with their friends and stage-whispering, "Did you touch him? OH MY GOD, you touched him. You touched Jude Law. Can I have sex with your hand?" I think what people really like about being in the presence of famous people is that it makes us feel like we're doing something vaguely interesting and worthwhile. There's a philosopher who developed a theory about how we all might be living in a virtual reality world simulation run by an advanced civilization, and his advice, if you want to hedge your bets in case his theory is true, is to basically be a good person and also hang out with as many famous people as possible, because then the advanced beings are less likely to turn your simulation off out of boredom.

There are no famous people in Seven Sisters. As far as even minor celebrities are concerned, Seven Sisters is a dead swathe of London, like an area on a post-apocalyptic map where the radioactive zones are marked. If a famous person did end up in Seven Sisters by accident, they would probably be met with a lukewarm reception by the Polish grocers and Somali internet shop owners, who would fail to recognise them and try to sell them internet for 50p an hour, or a boiled sausage. Maybe Lindsay Lohan should come up here for a fortnight's respite from paparazzi harrassment, give up drugs, put on some weight. We could advertise. You know it.

Meeting the famous: Like a little machine with a handle that you turn and anecdotes spill out of the other end. 8 out of 10.

*I'm imagining a scenario where there's a long line of people and God hasn't got time for a proper chat with all of them, like when my friend met the Dalai Lama and told him she liked his shoes, but I suppose that if God really cared then he could bend the rules of space and time so that as many people as possible could ask as many questions as they liked. The Dalai Lama cannot do that. Think about that, Buddhists.

posted by Eskimo @ 1:30 am 2 comments