Saving Private Benjamin

No, Steven Spielberg and Howard Zieff haven't fallen in love, hired Tom Hanks and Goldie Hawn, and collaborated on a shit film. I'm talking about the fact that Ben of Benopause fame has decided to go on hiatus. Without him, who will listen to music and recommend tunes to us (other than Saf?)



I think we should start a petition to force him back onto his blog! We don't care what you write, just get writing... bitch! And stop looking so pissed off!

I Had A Dream...

The other night I had the weirdest dream. I dreamt that I was in a zombie movie playing a character who's mother had died in childbirth and he was half-ghost! Then he joined forces with a full ghost to fight zombie! What the $@%* does that mean? Apparently it means this!

Fair enough, work is shit! Hail to the king baby!

Ask A Ninja...

Saw this on Youtube. As a proud subscriber to Ask A Ninja, I was glad to see he's getting the recognition he so rightly deserves...

Baby On The Way...

My sister Sharon is due to drop any day now! I thought it would be nice to put a picture of my future nephew's big brother looking very excited about his forthcoming sibling:-



On the count of three... aaaaaaaww!

Some Sad News...

I emailed the lovely Claire today, and in her reply she told me that she only saw me as a mate. Bad news as it was early days really but I thought she was really nice, so at least we're going to remain friends. Well, after a number of dates this month and only one possible potential, I guess I'm back to square one... time to start emailing those ladies on MSF, I think!

Start Of Date : 18.17...

...end of date : 21.35. Total running time : 198 mins.

That's not too bad going. This was with Rachel, a Welsh teacher (no, she doesn't teach Welsh!) currently the last of my lined-up dates on my list. She was nice enough, though it took a little while to get warmed up and into the swing of chatting, but I had a pleasant enough time. It's doubtful I'll meet up with her again, I don't think we had enough in common or enough of a spark throughout the evening. Oh well!

Idlewild!

Okay, compared to Saf I'm a little slow on the uptake, so I thought I'd better do a review of the gig from friday. It was a last minute thing, organised by the lovely Claire who had two spare tickets for the Palais in Hammersmith. I've never been a fan of Idlewild but I thought I'd give it a go if it meant actually getting a second date! After much coercion, Saf finally agreed to play Goose to my Maverick and he came along (I don't know why we keep doing these Top Gun references - I've never even seen it!).

Not much of the music was that familiar, I think I recognised one of the last songs of the evening which apparently came from a VERY early album. Overall it was a nice relaxing atmosphere, very unlike the Sounds where we were almost killed a number of times!

As for the rest of the weekend, not much really! After failing to pursuade Martin to organise something for Saturday night, I spent most of the day at my mate Jo's watching TV and eating Chinese. Yum!

Sunday was a "quiet night in", and got to watch Pan's Labyrinth which was very good! Recommended!

Probably The Best Sitcom In The World!

At least the most underrated! That's right, Spaced rocks! If you've never seen it before, and have 24 minutes and 4 seconds to spare, below is the very first episode in its entirety to give you a taster of what you missed out on in the years 1999 to 2001. It's from the creators of Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz, so you can't go wrong!

S1E1 - Beginnings
Uploaded by mrcorbtt

The Sounds!

Imagine my horror as I turn up to a gig apparently fronted by a leggy Swedish lesbian and end up with some bloke’s legs around my neck and his cock and balls in my face!

That’s correct, this was The Sounds in concert at the Carling Academy, and I was especially excited after seeing the cover to one of their albums:-



Cough (boobies) cough! Anyway, after a long wait for them to come on stage, the wait consisting of performances by two LA groups called "Low Vs Diamond" (who’s lead singer bore a striking resemblance to Jonathan Richman) and the crowd-diving "Under The Influence Of Giants" (who’s lead singer bore a striking resemblance to the love child of Mick Jagger and an arsehole, and had the unfortunate aim of the landing in the crowd with his legs wither side of my head!), Maja Ivarsson and her boys finally made their way onto stage. It was at this point that everyone started surging towards the stage – to which Saf and I were standing quite close.



Pretty damn good performance from the little-known five piece. Some rip-roaring tracks, only three of which I vaguely knew, and some high-octane energy from the high-kicking Maja herself. It almost ended in disaster with a badly-timed crowd-dive towards the end – occurring during a seizure-inducing light show – whereby only Maja’s legs were caught in time and her head nearly plummeted towards the ground. She was saved by a female groupie who grabbed her, kissed her, and declared her love for her. You usually have to pay good money for that sort of action…

Anyway, aside from an attempted pick-pocketing it was an excellent night out. And at a measly £8.50, you couldn’t go wrong!

I'm Finally Giving Up...

...No, not on dating, and not on life. I'm finally giving up on trying to start the titles of my blog entries with the word "Start". I kept it up for over three weeks, but now it is time to put away childish things and grow up!

By the way, I liked that Sooty clip of Ben's...

Start Of Date : 18.31...

...end of date : 23.12. Total running time : 281 mins.

Now THAT'S a proper date. Nearly five hours of non-stop banter and fun! This was with Claire off MSF, and she's lovely! We went for drinks, then Chinese, then more drinks! Nice! She's quite tall (my height), very cute (looks a bit like Penny from Teachers) and knows how to hold a conversation (specialities include film and music). I'll definitely be seeing her again (if she wants to, which I think she does!). Good times!

Starter For Ten

Don't forget - Ben is hosting his quiz at the Pelican from 8pm tomorrow night, the 20th March 2007.

Come one come all!

Startling Stuff!

Check out the end credits to Seed Of Chucky - unfortunately badly edited at one point for nudity! All death scenes (bar one) included for your viewing pleasure - all to the tune of a Blondie cover! Great! I especially like when Hannah from S-Club gets "fired".

Start Of Date : 19.31...

...end of date : 20.57. Total running time : 86 mins.

Okay, what's going on in the world? I remember, not too long ago, when dates would last a minimum of 4 hours. Now people seem to have to get up in the middle of the night to go to the gym? What's that all about?

Still, at least Catrin spoke to me for the whole evening, and not to some drunk producers at the next table. She was nice enough, but I don't think this will go anywhere. She seemed quite flustered at the end of the night, but I'll put that down to nerves... I don't think she was too keen anyway.

So, back to MSF - once their website's up and running!

Start Of Date : 20.19...

...end of date : 21.06. Total running time : 47 mins.

To be honest, I've done shits that lasted longer, and were more satisfying! The night started off with Naomi turning up 20 minutes late. One of the first things she said was "I've got to get up for marathon training at 5.30, so I'll have to leave early." Great I thought, as we sat down to have a drink. At this point two slightly tipsy middle-aged men sat down at our table, and Naomi actively engaged them in conversation! At this point I was actually thinking that I should just go home!

One of the drunks turned out to be TV producer Simon Harries, producer of such classics as This Morning and Queer Eye For The Straight Guy (believe me, I had to look THAT one up!). Naomi then became quite interested in telling him that she was a TV presenter / actress, and actually gave him her card! He actually has more information about her than I do!

What a joke! It's no wonder there's so many attractive single women out there if this is how they behave on a date! She sent me the standard, Hi, had a nice time email this morning, but I think I might just ignore it. Oh well, back to MSF, there's two quite interesting sounding women on there that have emailed me, so let's soldier on...

Starting To Spot Less Similarities...

Hmm, I must really look like John Mayer. Who is he?

My cool celebrity look-alike collage from MyHeritage.com. Get one for yourself.

Starting To Spot The Similarities...

Inspired by Ben's blog, I've stolen his idea and put on a lookalike collage! Wow! Apparently I look like both Wonder Woman and Ferris Bueller! How bizarre! Let's try a different picture...

My cool celebrity look-alike collage from MyHeritage.com. Get one for yourself.

Starting To Prepare...

...for tonight. Date number 1 of 2 this week. This is the hopeful one, Naomi the actress; very cute, knows Basil Brush, smuggles drugs, she's got it all! Count on an update tomorrow (I believe Saf would call it a post-mortem).

Starter, Main Course, Dessert... MEAT!

I see Saf's already let you all in on saturdays trip to Rodizio Ricco... well, it was a very odd place indeed. Possibly the only place I've ever been to where the salad cart included deep fried bananas and chips... and no potato salad!

Some of the meat may have looked like something you might expect to see in The League Of Gentlemen, but it was definitely not special stuff! Some of the delicacies available included chicken sausages (?), and for those brave enough amongst us you could get a whole skewer of fat and gristle. Tasty!

Starting To Look Promising...

All systems go for tuesday - I've organised my date with Naomi, here's hoping it goes well. Saf, one for you - she hates Leicester Square! Woo hoo! A woman of good taste, methinks!

And for fans of Monkey Dust and Ivan Dobski, the Meatsafe Murderer:-

Start A Search On Google

I was pleasantly surprised to find that if you type key words from both of my blogs into Google, they both show up top of the list - not too shabby an achievement for something called Ed's Movie Review, which seems to be quite a common name! Yay me!

I suspect this is largely due to the C4i over spill from Saf's blog, so cheers Saf and all your friends!

Starting To Get Tired Of Speeddater

I received an email this morning - that's right, the usual blackmail fodder from the aforementioned dating site. It read:-

"You’re profile is proving popular! So we thought we’d send you a list of the people who’ve checked out your profile in the last 7 days. Why don’t you send them a message or add them to your favourites?"

How convenient! Why not give us some more money so you can write to these women? Sounds like fun... fun to rhyme with rip-off! One of the women claimed to be on an 8 figure salary. 8 figures? That's £10 million! No one earns that sort of money! It's crazy!!

Start Of A Futile Endeavour

Well, Saf and I have both emailed our 'definite yes' ladies. Could be interesting to see what happens over the next few days... my personal belief is that neither one of us will get anywhere with any of them. Still, I've got a date with Naomi next tuesday (assuming she doesn't cancel), so here's hoping something works out for one of us...

FYI, Naomi is a girl I was speaking to on MSF. She's an actress who has starred with high brow celebrities like Sir Basil Brush, so I'm sure we'll have plenty to talk about!

Start Of An Interesting Dilemma

Well, the full results are still not in for Speed Dating. Four ladies have yet to decide. So far the scores are as follows:-

Dates : Me = 3, Saf = 2
Friends : Me = 2, Saf = 2
F*ck off and die : Me = 2, Saf = 3

Pretty good going for our first time out there, but here's the dilemma... me and Saf have got two girls that want to date both of us! Now either we didn't make it clear enough that we were friends and that dating both of us could cause problems, or some women like to cause rifts! So, it looks like Saf and I will have to "divvy up the goods" so to speak. Either that or take it in turns...

...man, that sounds so wrong...

Start Of A Beautiful Relationship?

Answer : Doubtful!

Last nights Speed Dating was an... experience, but some people just have no idea how to conduct a conversation. Thankfully I got the worst of the bunch out of the way at the start so, though I was a little disheartened at this point, the best was yet to come. Of course, I am using best in the losest sense of the word!

The results have yet to be published, although we do know that the blood-stone girl doesn't want to be friends with either me or Saf, but once we know the final score, we'll let you, our loyal fans, in on the total!

UPDATE!
Final scores not yet in. So far I'm beating Saf by one (yay!), but we've both been picked for dates by the same girl! Also, looking at her profile, she's actually taller than both of us! Good times!

Start Of A New Month

It's the first of March, and that can mean only one thing... that's right! Speed Dating! Me and Saf are off to Leicester Square tonight to meet 20 ladies, at least one of which will hopefully float each of our boats (that's one each, not one between us. The latter would be very wrong). Failing that, my MSF membership runs out next wednesday, so I guess more Speed Dating may be in the cards.