Showing posts with label Stewart Lee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stewart Lee. Show all posts

Thursday, October 07, 2010

What was Udo's Choice in the end?....

Udo's choice which I presume would be different to....


Odo's choice, which would be to change into a desklight and whine about things


So my guttywuts are tying to kill me, although in thinking about it I started the war, and the "gut fire" to paraphrase William "Billy" Joel. I have acid reflux and various gut-related things through years of stress and misuse and also from going from PhD to stand up comedy, two fields synonymous with stress, cigarettes and bad diet. I am also back in Ireland where coleslaw and cheese counts as "salad", chips are vegetables and thus one of the "five a day", and Guinness and Baileys are the "health drinks" you have when you are not meant to be drinking. Plus I am 34, when in evolutionary terms I should be fathering and minding children rather than worrying about when I can get the time to really play Halo:Reach properly, although as Scottish comedian Gary Croft pointed out the other day, having kids normally makes you want to drink and smoke more.

I recently had a Esophagogastroduodenoscopy (EGD) with biopsy or 'gut scope' as it is more scientifically known. The nurse said not to worry as the camera was 'only the size of a chip', my geek mind went into overdrive and explained to me internally that while the camera end may have roughly the diameter of a chip, chips normally aren't 2 foot long with a plug hanging out the back and get washed in wee sinks like the tail end of an 'Alien' space hugger. I got sedated which was awesome, some people I knew went, 'don't bother with sedation, you'll feel drunk all day', yes, but what if you want to feel drunk all day. They accidentally wrote "colonoscopy" on my paperwork but I didn't need one, which was a shame as I had lubed myself up as precaution, as one does in any situation where women are approaching you with rubber gloves on. People think the dentist is expensive but you can pay a lot more for having two women approach you with vibrating equipment.

Only joking I was a bit worried for two reasons:

1. I had not prepared and had not drunk the four liters of licorice flavored 'shit yourself juice' or 'laxative' as I believed it is called, and..
2. Stewart Lee has already done pretty much the definitive 'comedian gets a colonoscopy' routine and it would be churlish of me, with the best will in the world, to claim that the last ten years or so of bad diet was an elaborate tribute act.

So now I have to start eating healthily, I thought I'd start slowly by going to the health shop and asking for the unhealthiest thing in it, turns out it was the proprietor (haha sorry). I now have a fondness for Nairns oatcakes, Whole Food's 'Wake Up' coffee alternative, which is thankfully made with guarana and not guano as I had originally thought upon reading the label, and rice cakes. And the afore mentioned Udo's Choice which seems to me to be like a bad sci-fi movie, like he has to choose between a sexy alien and sexy cyborg but he loves them both! what will "Udo's Choice" be....

It was a shame as I had my vice equilibrium finely tuned:



and now look at it!


It's alright though as I now fantasize about an huge meteor coming to destroy earth ala the great Canadian film Last Night or Mick Farren's great short story 'Fun in the Final Days' when I can smoke and drink with abandon, either that or whenever I have sex again, although, it will probably be the meteor thing first. In the meantime, that'll be me crying and jamming rice cakes into my face and masturbating outside the window of your local fast food joint....


Thursday, July 02, 2009

From the Vaults: The National Student..June 1995











Had this idea a while back to scan in all my old journalism stuff instead of carrying round photocopies all the time. Here is one of the first bits of humour writing I ever did from the June 1995 issue of 'National Student' called the "The illusion of Study".

At the time, I was amazed to be in the same publication as Jarvis Cocker, Stewart Lee, and on the same page as Tank Girl. 90s-tastic...

Monday, September 15, 2008

The Golden Record: Sounds of Earth...





Apart from this lovely gallery, my other haven from the flyering madness on the Royal Mile was The Collective Gallery's great The Golden Record: Sounds of Earth exhibition curated by Mel Brimfield.

Where comedians, artists and filmmakers collaborated on various audio visual pieces all inspired by the materials placed on the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 to introduce our culture to alien races via music and photos and smiling naked people. Like this one Termite Notification For Future Life Forms.

The first gallery consisted of 116 works the size of vinyl album covers each and intereptation of the 116 'images of earth' compiled by Nasa, see the images and loads more here. Youtube clip of the images here.

There was also a viewing room played a documentary by Brimfield and Sally O' Reilly which focused on Carl Sagan and Earth Ambassador for Earth Contact Day Karen Carptenter. In cynical times it was a refreshing nostalgia trip to hear things like UN chief's potential greatings for alien races.

The second room consisted of a series of 3-5 minute pieces from artists, comedians, actors, poets (including Stewart Lee, John Hegley and Robert Ince and Lawrence and Gus ) of their prospective greetings to aliens. It was quite a haven after seeing stand up all day to sit in dark room and not get asked 'are you afraid of terrorism?' or 'who here's from England, give us a cheer...whose here from Scotland' (shudder), although some bits were obvious sections of some performers stand up and one animation on hair uttered the phrase 'like a wisp of cotton candy over a paper cut' but more tales of that later.

Once of my favorite experiences in Edinburgh overall I'd have to say to get an oasis of sci-fi arty geekness among all the comedy.



Thursday, January 24, 2008

Monday, October 08, 2007

Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy





Full series up from Google video on Stewart Lee's great site. There's also a lovely interview of Lee by Johnny Vegas