Monday, November 29, 2004

I have to admit that when it comes to music George Michael isn't up there in my top 100 artists of all time; but for some reason I found myself watching the George Michael documentary on the BBC tonight. Probably something to do with there being a general lack of quality programmes on TV on Monday evenings.

Maybe it was because I haven't paid any attention to his personal life (with the exception of his LA toilet antics of course) that I really got into it, and the background to the whole being caught 'in the act' was fascinating. It was also cool to find out about him coming to terms with being a gay man, and also finding out the reasons for some of the gaps in his career: the illness and then death of his partner Anselmo Feleppa and also the death of his mum.

Posted by Antz at 11:36 PM | Permalink | | |

Saturday, November 27, 2004

Today we made the trip across town to see the 'mighty' Leicester City play at Walkers Stadium. Football isn't, I have to admit, one of my passions, however the group of companies I work for has an Executive box and my team were invited to use it as a social event. David and I had also arranged to surprise his friend Mark with the trip as he's a Plymouth fan (who Leicester were playing) and even through he and his girlfriend were coming up for the weekend had no idea that we were including an afternoon of 'the beautiful game' as part of the itinerary. He was very surprised as we pulled up at the stadium and got out of the car. He was under the impression we were off to see deer at a local park.

I've been to a few matches before (always in the nice surroundings of a executive box) and have to admit that while I have no time for football on the TV a live game is a totally different experience. It's all to do with being there; surrounded by 20,000 fans chanting and shouting. Really enjoyed the whole thing (which was made even better by Leicester winning 2-1) although it would have been perfect if a couple of my workmates hadn't let me down by getting a little too drunk and being asked to leave by the club stewards. That'll something nice to deal with on Monday morning. Our MD will be so delighted.

Posted by Antz at 8:23 PM | Permalink | | |

Thursday, November 25, 2004

Four years ago David surrendered his driving license on medical grounds. He had a 'turn' at work which made him feel unable to drive because of fears he had that he may have a repeat episode while he was driving. He was actually able to have his license back 12 months later but was still very concerned that he might have another attack and so never bothered to reapply.

This has meant that ever since David has had to either use public transport or rely on getting lifts from me to get around (which isn't ideal as he works in London, Birmingham and Nottingham). I've been driving his car (aka Maud) ever since my car (aka The Frog) came to the end of its useful life as David wasn't able to do so.

Recently (possibly brought on by my plans to buy a MINI) David decided that the time was right to get back on the road, and had applied to get his license reinstated. It has taken the DVLA nearly two months to do the required medical checks etc but today they finally wrote back confirming he is once again able to drive. Talk about being excited.

So this evening he's driven us to the supermarket and also across the city to see our friend Adele. I was a bit concerned that have problems readjusting to being a motorist but it seems that he coped just fine; although he looked slightly daunted for the first couple of minutes.

Posted by Antz at 11:09 PM | Permalink | | |

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

I'm started to get a bit scared. Of what? I hear you ask. I'm starting to get scared about the UK government's move further and further towards a kind of big brother state. Over the last couple of years several laws have been introduced that seem to be gradually invading the UK's population's freedom.

We're forever being told that as a result of 9/11 the world has changed, forever. But unlike the USA the UK has always had to deal with terrorist attacks. Throughout the last thirty years we have been subjected to attacks across the country courtesy of the IRA and other groups. Throughout this time we seem to have coped without the wide ranging powers that our current government is now pushing through Parliament.

I'm simply concerned that one day we'll all wake up to discover that it's too late to stop the rapid invasion of our rights and liberties.

Posted by Antz at 10:44 PM | Permalink | | |

Finally I have a photo of the glamorous new MINI for you all! Enjoy.

Posted by Antz at 2:26 PM | Permalink | | |

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

I got sent a link to this funny flash movie called Chavhemian Rhapsody today and had to share it with you all.

Posted by Antz at 7:02 PM | Permalink | | |

Saturday, November 20, 2004

How did I ever cope without the ability to pause live TV programmes? For over 30 years I've lived in a world where television was unstoppable; if the phone rang or (heaven forbid) someone came round to visit I'd never get to find out the ending of the show I was watching. I'd end up having to wait for the whole series to be repeated and make sure that when the climax was approaching that I'd unplugged the phone and put 'Contaminated Area' signs on the front door.

Enter the wonderful world of Sky Plus. Sky Plus is, for those who don't live in the UK (or who live in a TV-free universe), the hard drive recorder satellite TV system created by BSkyB. It combines well over 100 channels of 'top quality' satellite TV with a built-in hard drive recording facility. Now, if the phone rings I can pause TV and then watch it from where I was interrupted later on. I could also rewind it or go back to the beginning of the show and watch the whole thing again. It's almost impossible to see who I managed to exist without it.

Posted by Antz at 7:43 PM | Permalink | | |

Friday, November 19, 2004

According to the Guardian Online Bill Gates (who is the world's second least favourite US citizen) receives nearly 4,000,000 emails each and every day. Most of which are no doubt offers of watches, medication and mortgages of questionable quality.

Supposedly "Mr Gates doesn't get a sore finger from deleting unwanted missives. (Microsoft) has a team of people dedicated to ensuring he only gets mail that he wants to read."

As the king of Microsoft Gates really should be in a position to stop spam, and possibly if his company's software wasn't so full of security holes there wouldn't be so much spam circulating anyway.

The bigger question would be, why doesn't he simply get a new email address?

Posted by Antz at 7:25 AM | Permalink | | |

Thursday, November 18, 2004

I've been going on about MINI for the last two months, and today was the day when I got to go to my local Mini dealership to collect my brand spanking new Cooper. Despite having to wait around for about 20 minutes for my Mini to be brought round from their storage area everything went pretty smoothly.

I'm now the (very) proud owner of a Mini Cooper with the chilli pack and lovely 17" white wheels. I'll be adding pictures shortly, but the fact that she is currently buried under a layer of snow is making it a little tricky.

I have to confess that when I first got behind the wheel I was pretty scared... For some reason driving different cars always fills me with dread. Luckily I soon settled in and (once I'd worked out how to get the driver's seat so I felt comfortable) and have had fun bombing round in it; the combination of the weather and needing to be at home so that Sky installers has stunted my roadtrips a bit though.

Still got to work out how to work some of the features though... But that's just part of the fun of having a new toy to play with! Yayee.

Posted by Antz at 7:50 PM | Permalink | | |

It's snowing. Today it has been warm and rain has been coming down in buckets, however suddenly the temperature has dropped and snow has started to fall; further more it's actually settling. The weather person on TV says it'll have gone by the morning but for the moment at least the cats can sit and wonder what the white fluffy stuff falling from the sky is.

Posted by Antz at 6:57 PM | Permalink | | |

According to an email I've just received from Stonewall the Civil Partnership Bill was passed by the House of Lords tonight. In the message they say "The Bill represents a historic step forward for lesbian and gay people in Britain. A huge thank you for all your support and encouragement over the past few months - we couldn't have got here without you."

The Civil Partnership Bill has really struggled to make its way through Parliament and has had strong resistance from "Bishops and bigots" since day one. Finally (with the threat of the Parliament Act to help them make up their minds) the Lords voted in favour at the Bill's third reading.

This will mean, within a year, gay men and lesbians will be able to become legal partners and enjoy all the benefits and responsibilities a different-sex couple do. About bloody time.

[UPDATE] BBC has reported the story here.

Posted by Antz at 1:13 AM | Permalink | | |

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Sometimes, when you're surfing the net, you simply bump into something that you end up hours looking at; even though you didn't know you were interested in it. Maybe it's just me.

Today, while I was reading an item on The Register, I came across a feature about UK national ID cards called "Everything you never wanted to know about ID cards". The whole idea of ID cards has always worried me and the feature did nothing to instill any confidence in me that the current plans are anything other than bad news.

If you've got an hour or so check it out.

Posted by Antz at 9:16 PM | Permalink | | |

Monday, November 15, 2004

David (aka the boyfriend) will be one of the first to admit that he occasionally gets wrapped up in plans that he quickly loses interest in. The house is full of things that were good ideas at the time but sadly get relegated to the loft or the spare room after a few days. So, when he mentioned a month or so ago that he'd decided to run in the London Marathon in support of the Big Issue Foundation, I was slightly skeptical about whether or not the plan would get off of the drawing board.

So I have to take my hat off to him for having actually managed to put together a training routine and to have stuck with it for over two weeks. Every two days he has gone out in the dark and the cold and run the programme's required miles. He's forced himself out of the house and arranged to be dropped off several miles away from home so he can run the distance back. He's even turned down after work drinks so he stick to the marathon programme.

And from my perspective I'm not only getting a fitter boyfriend, I'm also getting one with a fine looking lycra-clad butt.

If you'd like to sponsor David you can do so here.

Posted by Antz at 10:56 PM | Permalink | | |

Finally the night times have returned to their usual calm. Not a firework to be seen or heard anywhere. Heavenly.

Posted by Antz at 10:33 PM | Permalink | | |

Saturday, November 13, 2004

We're now in the second week of our very own personal Baghdad experience. It's now a week since Bonfire Night and my little part of Leicester continues to reverberate to the bangs and flashes of fireworks every night from dusk until midnight. Tonight itself is Diwali and so there are even more explosions and tremors than usual. Abs and Fitch have spent much of the night hiding upstairs in one of the quieter parts of the house, although judging by some of the bangs they'd need to be in a nuclear bunker to avoid the aftershocks.

Recently a new law came into effect to tighten up on the random use of fireworks; however the law seems to have had completely the wrong effect. In previous years the banging seems to come to a halt around 10 o'clock but this year (with the law allowing fireworks until midnight around Bonfire Night) they're going on much much later.

Posted by Antz at 1:18 AM | Permalink | | |

Friday, November 12, 2004

Ever since I brought the house I've had cable TV through NTL; originally it was old-school analogue and now it's all high-tech and digital. The trouble is, NTL's cable TV is so unreliable. Nine times out of ten the on-screen TV guide fails to tell you anything about the programmes coming up except that "No details are available"; Most of the time the programme reminders don't bother to actually remind you when the show you wanted to watch comes on; Several times each night the picture goes off for a few seconds; and its best feature: the interactive red button.

The interactive red button on Sky and Telewest brings a whole new world of entertainment to your fingertips, meanwhile in the wonderful world of NTL the red button gives you so much more of an interactive experience. Mainly because if you're actually brave enough to press it your cable box will hang for about an hour and then you'll have to (interactively) get off the sofa, (interactively) walk over to the cable box and then (interactively) pull out the power cord so that the box will reboot. You don't get more interactive than that.

The last straw was coming home to find that the cable box had decided to crash and wouldn't start back up. I phoned NTL only to be told that it would be more than a week before they could send an engineer to weave his magic and (probably) replace the box with (yet another) new one. As it turned out the box finally managed to reboot itself after five hours or so but by then the damage had already been done.

I've given up on NTL and signed up with the Microsoft of the TV world, Sky. One of their engineers is coming next week to stick a small tea tray onto the back of the house and install a nice and shiny Sky Plus box in the living room. Mmmmmm Sky Plus... Sky's very own version of the TiVo system. No more missed programmes ever again plus the ability to pause live TV shows. Hopefully it'll also let you know what's on the TV too.

Posted by Antz at 11:43 PM | Permalink | | |

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

It seems like i've been waiting for months even though it's been less than two, but today I got a call from my local MINI dealership telling me that my new MINI will be ready next Thursday - a whole week earlier than originally planned. The ever glamourous Julia from Sytner Leicester gave me a call this afternoon with the good news and to give me the car's registration number. Just think... only seven days to go.

Posted by Antz at 11:57 PM | Permalink | | |

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

The Guardian today reported that in the US a school district is in court because of stickers that they place on their science textbooks that state "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."

It appears that a group of parents object to the way that the school board in Atlanta's Cobb County was browbeaten into placing the stickers on text book by fundamentalist Christians; who objected to their children only being taught about evolution and not creationism.

"God created earth and man in his image," Patricia Fuller told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Leave this garbage out of the textbooks. I don't want anybody taking care of me in a nursing home some day to think I came from a monkey."

Personally I think Ms Fuller is a few evolutionary stages closer to monkeys than the rest of us.

Posted by Antz at 11:37 PM | Permalink | | |

Monday, November 08, 2004

About ten years ago Leicester became Europe's first environment city. This meant that we were some of the first people to get kerbside recycling and various green initiatives. The district I live in introduced a duel-bin system a few years ago that meant that in addition to the usual black wheelie-bin we also got a green bin for paper, plastic bottles and tins. Definitely a step in the right direction until you realise how many things you can't put in it, which include glass, any form of card or board and (oddly enough) envelopes.

But, according to a DVD delivered by our local council, all that is to change. We're to be given an addtional two smaller bins at the end of the year to handle glass and all forms of paper and board (including envelopes). At last we'll be able to recycle a much larger amount of our rubbish on a weekly basis without endless trips to the bottlebank.

Posted by Antz at 9:57 PM | Permalink | | |

Sunday, November 07, 2004

Being two days after the British tradition that is Bonfire Night you'd imagine that the residents of Leicester would have got bored of lighting the blue touchpaper and letting loose firework after firework after firework by now. Sadly it would seem that the combination of Bonfire Night and the festival of Diwali means that for the seventh night in a row we're being subjected to a constant barrage of very loud bangs and bright flashes from early afternoon until well into the night.

Abs and Fitch, like nearly all four-legged inhabitats of the planet, hate the explosions and make a mad dash back into the house each time one goes off. It's not that I'm adverse to the idea of setting light to some gun powder filled rockets and setting them off skyward; I'm just adverse to having to shout across the room so that I can be heard over the bangs. Sometimes I get an idea of what it must be like to have lived through the Blitz.

Posted by Antz at 11:08 PM | Permalink | | |

Friday, November 05, 2004

Ask anyone and they'll tell you that life as a British gay man is much easier now than at any time in the last hundred years or so. Our co-workers no longer have the right to harass us while we go about our jobs; our school kids can now discover, at school, that it's alright to be gay; and, of course, we can't be sent to prison simply for expressing our love for one another.

So how can gay men get attacked on London's South Bank by a group of youths? How can they beat the life out of a man who had done nothing to deserve it? Nothing, that is, except be gay? If we have simply become part of the world-landscape why are gay men abused, beaten and even killed for simply being ourselves?

I've always had one hope. It's not that a cure would be found for cancer, HIV and AIDS; nor that there would be an overnight end to war and poverty; although all of those things would be great. My one hope was that someday very soon I would be able to walk down any street in Britain holding the hand of my boyfriend without fear of being abused, attached or insulted.

Now, like when David Copeland launched a one-man war on Soho's gay population in April 1999, it is very very clear that it'll be a very long time until my hope is ever realised.

Posted by Antz at 11:53 PM | Permalink | | |

Thursday, November 04, 2004

Like much of the world I spent yesterday morning in shock when it became apparent that George the Second was going to end up with his feet under the desk in the Oval Office and not John Kerry. How could the American people (or 51% of them) have made such a bad choice? Do they not see what he's done to the world during the last four years? The faux War on Terror has a lot to answer for.

Bush's re-election is, of course, bad news for the US's gay population. As a fundamental Christian Georgie doesn't agree with same-sex partnerships, and, probably, would like all gay people to be burnt as heretics. It's unlikely that he'll manage to get the wholesale burning of queers into law during the next four years but then it's unlikely that US LGB's will get any leeway on civil partnerships either.

The re-election of Mr Bush in the US certainly makes me pleased to be British and not American right now. David has declared that he has no intention of setting foot on US soil while George the Second is on the throne; I guess it'll be quite a while until we get to spend a weekend in NYC then.

Posted by Antz at 12:50 PM | Permalink | | |

Woke up this morning at 07.15 with Fitch sitting on my chest in bed; which usually means she wants feeding. This is something she's only started doing since Abs vanished a week ago. To avoid her sticking her claws in my face I crawled out of bed and started to make my way downstairs. I looked towards my office and there, sat on my chair, was young Abercrombie (aka the Missing Cat). He's looking fine although it looks like he may have been on Atkins as he's lost some weight.

Obviously, being a cat, he's not giving much away about where he's been; Probably something to do with his inability to speak or write. He looks in fine form though and has now curled up and gone to sleep on the sofa. In fact he looks just like the photo of him I posted the other day. All cute and sleepy.

Posted by Antz at 7:44 AM | Permalink | | |

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

The media, and the world at large, seems to only be full of one thing; the US Presidential Elections. You can't go online or switch on the TV without being barraged with non-news about Kerry, George the Second* and their pre-voting day exploits.

The oddest thing to me that the way that US residents have to register to vote, rather than everyone being registered annually and then being sent voting cards when needed. Most of the legal issues that seem to be going on over the water involves last minute registration of voters. How hard can it be for everyone to be registered in advance?

My work team (whom I don't normally mention for 'confidentiality 'reasons) discovered the exciting world of AntzOnline today. So from now on everyone knows 90 bits of useless information about me and can read the rambling rubbish that is this blog.

In home news: our wandering pussy is still at large. It's been six days now and sadly Abercrombie hasn't reappeared back at home. I'm still hoping that he'll made an appearance but as the days go on it's getting more and more unlikely.

*no link as Bush doesn't allow non US access to his site.

Posted by Antz at 11:21 PM | Permalink | | |

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