Happy Birthday Me...

Turned 25 the other tuesday. i'm not one for big extravagant birthday parties (i held my 21st in dingy sticky-floored Whelans in Dublin, where we all got trashed on jack and coke and bounced up and down to some half-decent alt rock for a few hours), and this year is no exception. The big difference with this year is that my low key celebrations were largely conducted in Tokyo. How fucking cool is that?!?!?!?!?!? But did we go for the traditional gaijin celebration tactic of getting wankered at a random foreigner-filled club in Roppongi? Oh no no no no no. Instead, we decided to take a trek to some of the shall we say weirder attractions that Tokyo has to offer, starting with the Parasitological Museum.

As the name suggests, Tokyo's Parasitological museum is dedicated to all things tapeworm and tropical. Though there was no English translation on any of the displays, the museum really did exactly what it said on the tin - in that there were jars of enormous worms and bugs that formerly inhabited a number of unfortunate hosts, from fish to birds to dogs to humans. The museum had several effects on me - apart from making me feel itchy when i looked at all the pics of the poor buggers who had their skin torn apart by skin bugs, i was terrified, fascinated, amused, bemused and downright entertained all at the same time. And though i couldn't be as empathetic to the case study of the man who had a parasite in his bollocks that caused them to swell and drag along the ground as the lads were, i still got my money's worth. Definitely one to recommend if you're ever in Tokyo on a rainy day, especially to look at the visitors' book to see all the weird little cartoons of people with parasites that former guests have doodled. Priceless.


After an hour of worms in jars, we headed on to an exhibition of photographs by Japanese photographer Hosoe Eikoh. The guy basically invented that whole skin-on-skin guess-the-body-part united-colours-of-benetton-ad-type-black-and-white-skin-together thing. He's most famous for the book of avant garde photos that he took of the writer Yukio Mishima, but the collection had stuff that he'd done throughout his career, and it was wonderful to see. One photo really got my attention, of a girl eating an apple. Seriously, eating an apple never seemed so erotic till i saw that photo.


After the exhibition we had to do something to keep ross interested, so we headed to the Yebisu Beer Museum. To be honest, i don't think i looked at a single thing there, i just swanned through it looking for the bar. and i wasn't disappointed - i got my sampling tray of 4 of Yebisu's finest brews including the bog standard lager, the weissbier, the red stuff and the black stuff, or watery guinness as i like to call it.

Then we found a random izakaya for some food and more beer (in substantially larger glasses, thanks be to jesus), threw some tasty j-food down us, and sprinted to shinjuku loft for a gig. Went to see OOIOO and Deerhoof play - Japanese/American noise rock at its very best. so i had possibly the weirdest birthday celebration i've ever had, but thanks to the power of tokyo, it worked out pretty well in the end. man i love tokyo...

Au revoir Jakers

So last weekend was my birthday celebration weekend - i hate birthdays so i always find that if i celebrate beforehand i can get good party time in without that horrible 'oh shite i'm so old' feeling niggling at me. cos i turned 25 on tuesday. that's a quarter century - fuck me when the hell did i reach my mid twenties? i had a great weekend nonethless - and i will elaborate on my tokyo adventures tomorrow. but for now i can't help but feel sad because my mate jake headed back home to england yesterday. so in honour of his sudden departure, i'm gonna use it as an excuse to post some of the ridiculous photos that i have managed to snap with jakers. cos jesus tapdancing christ the boy couldn't stop himself from pullin a face every time i pointed the camera in his direction. and the result is pure gold. so here, for your viewing pleasure, is the Best of Jake...


Jake loves kebab (the filthy hoor....)


Ugly loves company

You're supposed to look like that after you've drunk the Irish Carbomb...

Parts of Jake we hoped we'd never see

What a saucy minx

This Life...

Where the hell does the time go, eh? It has been a crazy few weeks, filled with a last week of school that nearly killed me with the unexpected workload, a holiday in hong kong that nearly killed me with the weight of all the delicious food that i consumed, and a new year that... well... wasn't actually eventful enough to inspire feelings of even mild discomfort let alone fear of impending death. I guess i have a lot of catching up to do in terms of these last few weeks of 2006, but really, fuck it. for now anyway. because all i can think of right now is Miles.

And it's not even a real life Miles. I am referring to the stuffy, now scruffy, member of the cast of This Life (that 90s show where all the lawyers lived in a house together and managed to drink, shag and argue their way round London) played by a real life Jack Davenport. Most of you probably didn't know me back in the days when This Life did its debut run on telly, but i was hooked on it from the beginning. I watched both series and couldn't wait for the next installment of gratuitous swearing and sex on the BBC, especially because i got to imagine that just maybe, one day, i too would meet a group of arseholes like the characters, and live with them in a big flat where we would cook dinner, smoke like chimneys, screw each other and drink too much wine. Beautiful... So you can imagine how utterly devastated i was when the last episode of the second (and last) series ended when millie found out about rachel coming on to egg and took a swing for her at miles's wedding to THE WRONG WOMAN, while warren walked in the door from his series-long travels wondering what all the fuss was about. What way is that to end a series anyway??? No resolution of ANY KIND WHATSOEVER!!! i have been living with this for 10 years. until tonight.

tonight, thanks to the genius of UkNova, i got to watch the 10-years-on-reunion-christmas-special of This Life from the comfort of my wee house in Numazu, Japan. And from the moment i heard that theme tune, i was right back in my house in northern ireland, sitting upstairs sneakily watching something that i know my da would go mad about if he caught me (incidentally, by the second series, i became somewhat emboldened by adoescent outrage and rebellion and actually deliberately watched it in front of him, gay sex in the jacks and all, just to piss him off. so it goes.) Everything was just the same, the same dynamic, the same snappy dialogue, the same sanse of voyeuristic thrill watching these people fuck everything up and bitch about each other. but one thing was different, and that was Miles. still an asshole, but jaysus jack davenport has got hot in his old age. now don't get me wrong, i still think he looks like a fucking public schoolboy, but what can i say, there's just something about slightly ugly men with scruffy hair that does it for me :)

you're probably wondering what i'm going on about, and in fairness after unsuccessfully trawling the net for a picture that gets across exactly what i mean, i see your point. i couldn't find a picture of him actually looking the way he did in the show, and normally he's a wee bit upper class twat around the face. lets just say he was somewhere in between posh english boy...

...and homeless boy.

but you have to trust me on this one, he looked hot!

okay, horny rant over. i promise i will never desecrate the pages of this blog again by lusting over a random actor.

well...