Anbody know a good spandex seamstress?

I am genuinely quite astonished that there aren't any real life superheroes. I'm not expecting them to be crowding every street corner but with a global population of over 6 billion, you'd expect at least a few. But no. No something-mans or incredible whatevers, not even a human-thingamabob.

Now obviously I'm not expecting any aliens from dying worlds or supernatural powers resulting from radioactive termite bites. Laser eyes are unlikely and telekinesis even more so (unless you're a jedi). But I'd honestly expect to see one or two heroes from the Batman, Iron Man fraternity. Ordinary guys with too much time and/or money who utilize fighting or technology skills in order to help mankind. I have heard it said that batman is symbolic of class warfare: Rich, white male uses inherited wealth to beat up street level criminals; but even if that is the case, my point still stands. Where are the spoilt little rich kids with slightly twisted views on justice, running around in tights and masks? As far as I'm aware, the closest thing we've got are fathers so desperate to get their kids that they feel the only way to prove they are sensible, responsible adults is to dress in lycra and try to climb buildings.

Some of you may be aware that I gave serious thought to filling this void myself a while back. Ever since a Lord of the Rings fancy dress party, I own a cape, and despite lacking any kind of physical combat training and possessing a minimal amount of villain foiling gadgets, I thought I might give a go. Utilising the more theatrical and mysterious sides of hero-dom, I felt I could at very least, get an article in the local paper, and if I was lucky, it would demand my capture and unmasking as all the best vigilante's press does. However my plan fell down slightly at what I would deem the second hurdle (the first being the cape, which I had covered quite stylishly) in that the closest thing to regular street crime in the area I live is small groups of 12 year olds in hoodies. And as satisfying as it may be, beat them up would have given me possibly more bad press than I would prefer.

So, alas, the world remains without a symbol of hope and justice. Maybe one day. Maybe when I've got a robot arm and cybernetic implants in my brain and I lead the revolution against our metallic overlords...


Surviving the Apocalypse Tip #18 : Destroying robots with microwaves is easy. The hard part is getting them to stay in there while you close the door.

Mark Zuckerberg Hashtagged My Girlfriend

Anybody else think that a decent internet connection should be part of our basic human rights?

So I've become a little bit of a professional social networker. Placed in charge on updating a website, facebook page, twitter account, vimeo feed and anything else I can think of that would increase what I believe the trendy professionals would term "groundswell".

I create a video blog that's uploaded to vimeo, which sends an automatic update to twitter saying that I've uploaded a video/vimeo (can I use that as an improper noun?), I then reference this tweet on the facebook page to keep those particular people in the loop, one of them copies the link to that FB post on their twitter account with @s & #s, which I then retweet on the first twitter. Not to mention the constant tagging and references at every possible moment, creating an interweb net big enough to catch a preverbial publicity whale. Not so much going round in circles, more "doing a spyrograph".

And I'm only making it worse with this blog, which I shall post to facebook, retweet to twitter, draw doodles of on post-it notes and stick them to peoples faces, you know, the usual stuff.

One day, when the robots have taken over, blogs will be the new underground revolution. However there'll be no internet so they'll be written on pidgeons and carved into street corners, perhaps becoming more than the such insignificant tripe that for the most part they are now. Not including me of course, I'm a vital cog in the machine of the survival of the human race. And not insane either. My therapist says so.

And on that note...


Surviving the Apocalypse Tip #13 : Ice cold baths are great for hiding from infrared vision. Good luck finding a working freezer.

A rose by any other number would still smell as sweet?

So tomorrow morning I travel up to London to start rehearsals for a musical I'm lighting up in Edinburgh. And the list of people I'm going to be working with is certainly an interesting one. There's someone who the public deemed "not as good as Jedward" (but then the public have always been morons), someone I've never heard of because I don't watch Eastenders and a guy whose professional surname is "7".

Now obviously it isn't unusual for actors, dancers, creative types to have a stage name. I know a guy who swapped his first name and surname round so that he could register with equity. But a numerical character is certainly the other end of the thought train. As far as I understand it, he's a hip-hop/street dancer so I guess it's his right to be a little bit wackier and seemingly more cool than the rest of us. And who knows, maybe it'll catch on. Would certainly make double barrel names easier. Although "John 9-3" sounds a bit like a question from a maths teacher.

In actual fact, for a short while I spelt my name with a silent 3 in the middle. It had no real effect on anything in my life other than adding an extra 20 seconds of explanation to any given conversation. It's an idea that I possibly borrowed from a Milton Jones joke and I didn't exactly apply it in any real situations. A mantra I mostly find to be true is that things that are funny on the internet, not necessarily so in the real world. For example, if a cat genuinely asked you if it can "haz cheeseburger" you'd freak the hell out (or possibly just correct it's grammar).

So I'm sure 7 is a nice guy and not a member of the Borg Collective. And who knows? If non-traditional character names really takes off, maybe my friends &y and K@ won't seem so strange anymore.



Surviving the Apocalypse Tip #7 : Dehydration can be as unpleasant as having your brains chewed on. Drink lots of water.

Blogging is the new man standing on a corner wearing a sandwich board

So I've decided to start a blog for a number reasons:

1. Several of my friends do it and I rather enjoy theirs. We'll call it being inspired.
2. As an ongoing effort to increase my internet presence, maybe at least get in the first 100 pages when I google my name.
3. A lot of humorous things happen to me and if I don't write them down, a) nobody else will be able to tell me just how funny they really are and b) I'll forget them almost immediately.
4. To coincide with a new, more creative phase of my life (more on that later).
5. I feel in 2011 it's been a lengthy enough period since the time when everyone was blogging about every little thing, therefore it managed to simultaneously become both cool and not cool.

Now there's probably a few things you need to know about me from this point on. I am hoping that there may be at least one person who reads this who isn't a close friend or a member of my immediate family so assuming a minimal level of Davonomics seems the wishful thing to do. I am what would be known in my circles as normal, yet to an outsider could be seen as clinical insanity. The point at which the surreal meets my relative thought pattern is more blurred than an astigmatic fruit fly. At many points in my life I have given serious consideration to becoming a superhero (I made my own cape), thought about getting a star wars based tattoo and spent countless hours in conversations about how to survive the coming zombie/robot apocalypse.

Now many of you may not take this last point seriously but I always think it's better to have a plan and not need it than have you're brain eaten by the living dead. There was a story in the paper a while ago about a guy writing to his local council to ask why they didn't have zombie contingencies in places. They didn't take him seriously either. In my eyes he's a modern day Nostradamus. So myself and a few like minded people have weighed the options and developed a basic plan. For the zombie version that is. The plan for the robot revolution is currently the same but I don't expect to live as long. Plus I think we get a bit more warning on that one so we put it on hold. If you want to know the plan, you'll have to convince me why you're worth bringing along.

So I'm a little odd. But sensible's overrated and rather counter-productive with alfresco-box-thought. Which brings me back to reason number (scroll up the page to remind myself) 4. In the past months I find myself turning a most creative streak. It started in ways not so out of the ordinary for me; building a prop bench, printing a custom monopoly board, making half a horse for a fancy dress costume, you know, the usual stuff. But also in more artistic ways. I have a background in music so comical songs have always been a small part of my spare time, but other members of the "arts" family start crowbarring their way into my interests. I took up street art with stencils and spray paint, started writing poetry, both funny and serious, turned my hand to script writing and found both an enjoyment and an apparent proficiency. I even made a very small forray into fashion, in the form of a suit jacket customised using the tools of my street art. And all of this worried me, always being a very technically minded person, suddenly I'm thinking like the dark side.

However I'm not one to be dramatic (I'll leave that to my many friends who live on the dark side) so I'll admit it worried me very little. And now I guess I embrace my new role as creativish and stick the talismans of my new phase around my neck. I have a little black book to write all my random thoughts, shorts and ideas of sorts, my witticisms and one-liners that at the very least, make me chuckle, I'm a founding member of a comedy circle which currently has no aims or goals other than to be slightly amusing (The Dead horse Society - I'll let you know if we do anything more substantial than update our twitter feed), I've got a sketch being performed at the Edinburgh Festival by a group of fantastically able and somewhat attractive actors and to top it all off, I've a jacket that looks like a hoodie's GCSE art project.

And if the zombies arise in the next week, my next blog may be the most important thing you ever read in your life.