This week's Objective is being recorded on a Monday night, which is giving me real AIOTM (aiotm) flashbacks, especially given the unprepared nature of the script. I even had to eat some Haribo, so strong was the sense of sickening familiarity. Has writing podcasts at the last second made me great at pulling stuff out of the bag, or has it ruined me and made me incapable of long term preparation? Or do I actually crave this feeling of dejection and fear now? Is this going to be my middle-aged pornography? Because I wasn't sure I was done with the regular pornography yet and to be honest I prefer that.
Still this week perhaps I can be forgiven for leaving it to the last minute and the ripples of idiocy (other people's and my own) kept on disturbing my day. At times this week writing comedy or having an opinion have seemed like a waste of time, but I have been through worse than this and bounced back. And I plugged away at it and as usual by midnight could see the end was in sight.
I was still more annoyed with Ian Apple, who I can't even tweet back at in anger, for making me change my word processing software, but Twitter proved to be helpful (like it was in the golden old days, when most of it was still fields) as I was able to find out how to open my word documents automatically in pages. I wasn't able to find a solution to the problem that has been bugging me for the last couple of weeks, in that you can't "Save as" in the most recent version of Pages. You have to duplicate and then save that document. It adds an unnecessary extra click to the whole process and over a lifetime of writing might waste me four or five minutes. It might seem strange to worry about that when I spent at least 40 minutes today arguing the toss with people who are never going to listen to anything I am actually saying and seem convinced that I spend most of my time going around dressed up like Hitler (I am not sure I have ever "dressed up" as Hitler - possibly for the photo shoot if putting on a suit constitutes dressing as Hitler) and that I only criticised Ricky Gervais for publicity (seemingly unaware that all I did was write a blog, days ago, which goes to people who already know me, which happened to get picked up by various websites and papers through without me having to do anything with it) - even now I still see the need to defend myself, even though I have no need to do so, but it's infuriating. But the point is wasting those forty minutes is part of my writing process. Having to duplicate and then save takes valuable milliseconds from my day. Is it so difficult just to have a "save as" option. I am going to blame Ian Apple for everything. All the other problems I have in my life, I am going to load them all on to him. This lack of save as is the straw that breaks the camel's back. I am going to take all the frustrations and my impotence and anger and get annoyed about this little tiny thing as a release valve to make myself feel better about my shitty little existence.... oh.... oh I see. Now I understand. Hey, sorry to all the little Twitter dweebs. I thought this was something to do with me. But it's not.
Still I did manage to do a bit of research into Page 3. My guest tomorrow is glamour model Lucy Pinder and it was slightly weird researching someone who hardly wearing any clothes wherever you try to find out about her. Not entirely unpleasant, but weird. But if you happen to check my History and you see anything unusual then it was research for this show. I have been researching it for quite a long time. As long as I have had internet access. And if I thought this week had been weird, look at some her Youtube videos (they are all relatively clean, but maybe not work safe) and check out the comments that she gets. Whilst people might have called me a mong and questioned my motivation and comedic value, they at least haven't got in touch to let me know what they would do if they got me alone or commented on which part of my work caused them to have an explosive ejaculation (and don't start now). I probably won't be able to talk to her about that on Radio 4 and I suppose creating ejaculations is part of her job (and she does it from afar without even knowing it's happening which makes her kind of magic), but there are some horrible and stupid people out there in the world and I guess trying to reason with them or hoping they might spot their own personality flaws is too much to hope for.
My genuinely favourite thing on her website (I am it seems more interested in the pornography of self-flagelation than looking at nudey pics it seems) was in the merchandise section where Lucy sells
book marks. I suppose it's not entirely incongruous that someone who likes looking at pictures of naked women might also enjoy reading books, but it just seems a not entirely lucrative crossover market and made me think of men having got a certain way through their latest porn magazine and not wanting to lose their place, so marking it with a mildly pornographic bookmark. It's the face that they are pulling as they place the bookmark that is what amuses me. I don't know if you are imagining it the same way as me, but if you are, it's very funny. £3.49 seems a lot for a bookmark. But at least you do get a choice of how many breasts you want exposed. And if you are a nice person (and a true lover of literature) you can get one with no breasts exposed at all.
You don't get that with a Kindle.
