I have a habit of sitting at my desk with the intention of getting on with some serious work only to have the serious part of my brain overpowered by the silly part. The silly part of my brain thinks that outlandishly stupid ideas count as conceptual art and that it doesn't matter if people don't like it, in fact that only serves to make it better. It started with my very private habit of separating Skittles before I eat them and for some reason that became a photo-blog that started with a couple of hundred hits and dropping with each (occasional) posting to the current average of about thirty. My ultimate aim is to have an exhibition in a gallery of blown up photographs of the Skittles plates that hardly anyone bothers to attend. The same is true of my other photo-blog dedicated to ice-cream van cartoons, surprisingly with fewer readers than the Skittles. One day I saw a painting of Mickey Mouse that was so terrible I had no choice but to take a picture. I then realised that cartoon characters on ice-cream vans are never particularly good and wondered if it might be a ruse to avoid copyright infringement, even so I decided that such a delight should be documented. At least with the ghost sign collection I managed to get a newspaper article out of it, something I very much doubt will happen with the other collections. It will be a brave publication that decides that the one thing it is missing is a weekly/monthly picture of a Disney character from an ice-cream van or a plate of Skittles. The one gig I am seriously holding out for is a food column for a newspaper or magazine reporting on breakfasts, I do feel that this is a useful service at least. Also, if a national publication wanted to pay me to travel around the country eating breakfasts in cafes then that would be a nice little career sideline to sit alongside the music journalism and broadcasting until I die of a heart attack brought on by my diet and people say it is how I would have liked to go.
Today I was diverted from my proper writing by an idea that at the time seemed almost sensible. My Twitter feed is getting quite full now and there are fewer tweets that I can delete now and I am just managing to stay below the 2000 mark. I still (unbelievably) don't have enough followers for thousands of tweets so I still keep my timeline trimmed but sooner or later I will have no choice but to go over the dreaded 3,200 tweets. You can only access 3,200 tweets so these people with tens of thousands of tweets will never be able to see some of their best postings, once you have tweeted for the 3,201st time your first ever tweet is gone. For this reason I have decided to archive certain tweets on dedicated pages on this blog site, starting with my semi-regular #crispreport tweets which you can find here. Thankfully nobody has pointed out that they are more accurately snacks than crisps but it is too late to change things now. Now if you need a quick reference for my snack based opinions you no longer have to trawl through my Twitter, and I intend to do the same thing with #gigreport and possibly putting my amusing posts up on their own page for the eventual day that they disappear into the ether. To me this is important although I am aware that this looks like I have wasted a day when I should have been working.
The Sunday Alternative will return soon.
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June housekeeping
The audio book of Bowie Day (a short story inspired by A Christmas Carol) will be released on August 31st. In the meantime the book can be downloaded to your Kindle from here.
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steveEoliver@gmail.com
