PowerPointless

A punishing weekend.  Out and about both nights and consumed by a work problem that began at 7.30pm on Friday with a request from my boss to find and send him an old PowerPoint presentation.  This has since become a mind-bendingly unpleasant quest worthy of a Peter Jackson-directed film adaptation.  Imagine Frodo Baggins spending much of a weekend:

• desperately checking messages on his hand-held magic message-displaying shard of rock;
• negotiating with the hideously uncaring Trolls of Weekend IT Support;
• howling with rage on realising that he can't access PowerPoint on his lap-crucible;
• making two separate, and futile, trips to the main place of work in the Shire to fax large amounts of paper that turn out to be the wrong large amounts of paper; and
• sighing as he gets yet another terse message on the rock from the Swedish hotel room in which Gandalf is fuming and drawing up a hobbity P45.

I have basically failed, so I could be blogging on the streets for loose change soon.

I did cheer up enough to do a little karaoke last night, which I like to do about every half decade or so.  The venue lost a huge amount of goodwill from me by employing a Bubbles-type character in the lavatory to bully punters into paying a quid to wash their hands and by squirted with water from a designer scent bottle.  "Don't get sprayed, don't get laid!" he leered as I feigned an important call coming in on my mobile.  It's a great way for bars to ensure men don't wash their hands.

I've also been listening to the brilliant new Indelicates album, Songs for Swinging Lovers.  They've done the Radiohead thing of offering it for as much as you want to pay for it, without the Radiohead comfort blanket of already being multi-millionaires.

This isn't really representative of the album but it's the only one on youtube.  They're usually much nastier: