The Clichéd Winter Blog

OK, I know what you're all thinking; "Where has Alex been for the past 3 days?! Why hasn't he written a blog?! Doesn't he know that some people thrive off knowing his daily thoughts and feelings?!" To answer all these questions in one sentence, I've been in Lincoln for the past 3 days, I haven't written a blog because I've had no motivation and nothing interesting has happened in my life since the last one, and yes I appreciate the fact that people want to know my thoughts and feelings but there's no point writing just for the sake of it. Phew! Glad I cleared that up.

(Note: I sincerely hope there isn't anyone out there who has been thinking any of these things. That would just be weird...)

So back to this blog. It's winter now, well almost anyway, but it's still bloody cold! I'm sat here in my room typing this, and I can't feel my right hand (my "mouse hand". I've been sitting on my comparatively useless left hand to keep it warm). I've also just realised that I've got my window wide open and my radiator isn't on. Well, I say "wide open"; the windows at Uni only open about three inches. We haven't had snow here unfortunately. Everywhere except Lincoln it seems. Typical.

One thing that is good about Uni is that there isn't hundreds of little kids running around with snowballs like there was at school. Don't get me wrong, I like a good old-fashioned snowball fight as much as the next guy, but there's a time and a place isn't there. I didn't mind getting hit with snowballs, as long as I was expecting it. I hated being caught unawares by them though. I must say at this point that I was going to tell you about the time I got hit by an ice ball in my French class at school, which would back up my point about being hit unexpectedly, but then I realised that it wasn't me who got hit, it was someone else. Incidentally, and also a bit off-topic, I once got hit on my head by a flying piece of pottery, also in my French class. Ahh, the good old days...

Global warming is the increase in the average measured temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans...

As promised, this blog is going to be about a topic "everybody is interested in, like Global Warming or something." Global Warming it is then! (For the record, the title is from Wikipedia. I do not own the copyright for that explanation, nor did I originally write it. Don't sue me...)

Right, so the world is melting. Good news for the amphibious folk among us then, yeah? Unfortunately we 'regular' humans don't have gills or webbed feet (well, some people do, but generally we don't, do we?). This would probably cause a minor problem if we were submerged underwater for the rest of our lives. It would be like that film with Kevin Costner, Waterworld, where only a few people would survive and the world would be full of pirates and other sea-dwelling groups. But at least we'd have Mount Everest to live on, I'm sure all 6billion of the world's current inhabitants would be able to fit on there. It could be a bit of a squeeze, but yeah, I reckon we'd manage.

Changing the topic slightly, I've been told to be more 'controversial' in my blogs to get more people reading them (you see, already I'm getting 'requests'). One of the topics mentioned was the death penalty. Now, I don't have any real opinion on this matter, but I said I would talk about it, which I'm doing now I guess. Should we bring it back? I honestly don't know. Maybe we should 'get rid' of the proper big-time criminals (i.e. murderers, not people who have nicked a handbag off an old woman), and then there might be less crimes going around. But I think if we were to bring Capital Punishment back, then we should make it into a Saturday Night TV Gameshow. I can see it now. Jim Davidson would present it, and all these serial killers would have to do certain tasks, whilst wearing funny items of clothing (i.e. Hull FC shirts, ballerina outfits, that kind of thing), but in each task, whoever comes last gets killed in a 'funny' kind of way. I've not thought of any 'funny' deaths as yet, but any suggestions would be welcome.

So that's my prediction for the future. We'll all end up living on Everest (the mountain) like one big happy family whilst Jim Davidson went around whipping people to death with wet tea towels. It'd be fun. I'm actually looking forward to it now. Anyone up for house sharing?

Meet Karl

For the past week or so, I've been addicted to listening to three men talking to each other about topics so random that even Mystic Meg wouldn't be able to predict what they're going to come out with next. The three men in question are Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington.

I was introducted to the trio by Loz, who has been listening to their various radio shows and podcasts for a while, and I'd noticed this. He sent me one of their 'special' one-off shows, for NME Radio, and I literally laughed out loud (LOL'd) at it. Saying that, I still 'LOL' at it now, even though I must've listened to that particular show about five times already.

More or less everyone in Britain must know who Ricky Gervais is by now. You know, he's that fat guy who dances funny, that's him. Stephen Merchant is also fairly famous. He's the tall one with glasses, off 'Extras'. Yeah, you know the one. Anyway, so these two are pretty famous and worked on a radio show for XFM a few years ago. After 'The Office', which they both wrote together, they went back to XFM "as conquering heroes" and basically couldn't be bothered to run the desk, or push any buttons. This is where Karl Pilkington comes in...

Karl is known 'affectionately' as the "little bald Manc t**t" or "the shaven monkey with a head like a f***ing orange". Thing is though, despite his abnormal, completely spherical shaped head and his lack of intelligence, Karl is actually one of the most unwittingly funny people you will ever come across. I don't think there is much more I can say about him to be honest, but I definitely think you should YouTube him or go on www.pilkipedia.co.uk to download some of the radio shows.

Anyway, I'm going to leave it there now. This blog topic seemed like a good idea to start with, but it kind of turned into a mini-biography or review. Sorry. But yeah, I just had to 'spread the word' further, and share my enjoyment with you lot, that's all. I promise the next blog will definitely be about a topic everybody is interested in, like Global Warming or something.

See you all soon!

P.S. Don't worry, I'm not going to write about Global Warming, unless between now and my next blog, the Polar Ice-Caps completely melt, which I completely doubt...

In the beginning...

Right, hello and welcome to my newly-established blog. I thought I should start doing something comparatively productive with my spare time, and since I'm doing Journalism at Uni, blogging seemed the easy road to go down. Hopefully you'll enjoy reading them as much as I'll hopefully enjoy writing them (I'm using 'you' on the basis that someone is actually reading this by the way...).

Although I may sound fairly confident and professional (ahem...), this is actually the first blog I've ever written; I'm a blog virgin, you could say. However I think I've learnt some vital skills from probably the best (and only) blogger I know; my good friend, Sam Axon. His blogs on MySpace gave me endless laughter, and I hope one day to be as good as him. Incidentally, I managed to persuade him to 'come out of blogging retirement', so to speak, and he's writing his own blog on this very site as I am typing this! I use the word 'persuade' pretty loosely; it didn't really take much persuasion; I basically linked him to this website and said, "You should start blogging again" and he said "OK".

So yeah, I'm not exactly sure what else to talk about in this introductory blog, so I think I'm just gonna 'wrap it up', as they say in the business (apparently). I'll be back soon with more, ciao for now!