High life and low life:

and all of it was top. I surfed a wave of social strata over the past week, starting off with dinner round at Devon's on Sunday evening. She and Vanessa had prepared a load of sushi, miso soup and associated Japanese food and it was rather good.

Jez had another mini dinner party thing on Wednesday, this time with some excellent Italian food. Who'd've thought that putting honey in pasta would be a good idea? Answer: Jez, and he's right.

Then last night, Kate and I (after yet more pasta - it's hard to get tired of anything when someone else is cooking it for you) went ten-pin bowling. Oh yes. I want me a pair of bowling shoes. Anyway, it turns out that the flat Bar Olympics weren't a fluke: I really am disgustingly bad at pub games. Final score: pool 3-0 to Kate, air hockey 1-0 to me, bowling 1-1 score draw. I lose 4-2 on aggregate.

3-0 at pool. Jesus.

Jockrock, I salute you.

I went to see the tsunami relief gig at the SECC last night, officially with Kate and accidentally with Dom and Alice. We turned up too late to see Deacon Blue, but we did see, in roughly chronological order:

• Colin MacIntyre (of Mull Historical Society): all I have to say is it's haircut time for this chap.
  
• Slam: techno? At a gig otherwise performed by pale guitar-wielding indie muso types?
  
• Kevin MacDermott: your guess is as good as mine.
  
• Mogwai: I've seen these guys twice before, both times in apocalyptic insane-o-sound, but unfortunately this time the levels were a bit off. Still, they're utterly unlike any other mainstream group (and no, Godspeed You Black Emperor are not mainstream!) and still worth watching; when was the last time you had your earwax loosened by a bunch of proto-neds playing avant-garde instumental prog rock? Exactly.
  
• Belle & Sebastian seemed to suffer from the same problem with levels as Mogwai, but they did make a point of playing a set of their most crowd-pleasing songs, which I thought was pretty good of them.
  
• Eugene Kelly: yeah, I thought "Who?" as well until he mentioned "I used to be in a band called The Vaselines," and suddenly we all understood, and sang along with Jesus Don't Want Me For A Sunbeam".
  
• Teenage Fanclub were introduced by Simon Pegg, no less, as being his favourite band. At last; my obsession is justified by a cult celebrity. Oh ye of little faith... Now, being unequivocally the best band in the world, I was justifiably looking forward to the Fanclub's set. The problem was that they played a couple of relatively obscure tracks while suffering from the same level problems that plagued the other full bands, and then did a new track that no-one seemed to know. A shame, because they were in illustrious and deferential company who were falling over themselves to pay tribute, but never mind. The show went on.
  
• Trashcan Sinatras: er. No idea. They were good, in an indie-meets-acoustic-folk way.
  
• Travis: I had no idea, when Tiny Monkey covered All I Want To Do Is Rock, that so many people knew it. Turns out they do, and my God, Travis know how to use a crowd pleaser. They've got to be one of the most enthusiastic live bands I've seen, and even though Fran Healy can come across as a bit over-earnest, who cares when they can rock so well? At one point I was amazed by all of the lighters I saw in the crowd, only to realise that they were all the pale, glowing screens of mobile phones as everyone took pictures of the band. Odd!
  
• Idlewild: Idlewild on after Travis? Apparently so. They must have an album out or something. They played a rather good acoustic set - the ever-so-slightly folky nature of The Remote Part translated well to the sans-drum line-up. One of the highlights of the gig, along with Travis and...
  
• Franz Ferdinand caned through their set (Matinée, Jacqueline, with Nirvana's In Bloom sneakily spliced into the middle, and Take Me Out) like they couldn't wait to do some new stuff. It felt bizarrely like being in the current T In The Park/T On The Fringe/Triptych advert, and the crowd were going similarly mad.
  
• Eddi Reader, unfortunately placed after FF's roof-raising set, had to deal with 'special' guest Karen Dunbar and didn't really get the chance to do as well as she might have done. She might be hailed as a worthy champion of traditional Scots' music, but she felt a bit lost in amongst the indie scrum.
  
• Texas: gah. When, after A) The Man Who, B) 100 Broken Windows or C) Franz Ferdinand, were Texas ever big enough to justify topping the bill at this gig? Fair enough, they were all excellent musicians, and Sharleen Spiteri can sing spectacularly well, but they felt a little tired and didn't have the rose-tinted spectacles effect that even Teenage Fanclub can rely upon for part of their appeal. Does anyone really look back fondly on a Texas album and say "They don't make them like that any more,"? Meh. Perhaps I'm being uncharitable. Fortunately...
  
• Gary Lightbody (of Snow Patrol) popped up on his indie lonesome at the end of the gig. Introduced once more by Simon Pegg, he played a single acoustic version of Run. You've got to hand it to the guy - five years of nothing at all, and then one album later and you're famous enough to close the biggest Scottish gig of recent years. And the crowd absolutely loved it.
  

The only slight down side was that having bought the uber-expensive seated tickets because there were no standing ones left, we couldn't get down into the standing area. The bouncers might have been working for free, but depressingly they hadn't left any of their joyless efficiency at home...

Ach well. It was still excellent. When you see maybe half of your favourite bands play on one night, it can't really fail to be.

Pop quiz:

1. You are Jeff. You answer the phone. You sign off with "Bye, babe". Who were you talking to?
   
   
   
   1. Your gran
      
   2. A German chap named Moritz
      
   3. Your girlfriend
      
   
   
2. You are me. You park the car outside the flat on Sunday afternoon and forget about it for three days. You decide to take it to work so you can drive round some flats afterwards. How many parking tickets have Satan's minions placed on it?
   
   
   
   1. 3
      
   2. 3
      
   3. 3
      
   
   

Answers: all of the above.

Jeff's birthday

expanded to cover all available free time last week. Not that that's a bad thing, mind you. On Wednesday we ate a shitload of curry and drank too much beer; on Friday Josh and Devon hosted a murder mystery party at which I spoke in an Irish "accent" and drank too much wine, and yesterday the three amigos had a light 10-hour boozing session during which I drank too much of everything.

In between the drinking madness, I took Josh to the airport to pick up a parcel and stopped in at guitarguitar to test-drive one of these with a view to buying something like this. For a guitar that only costs £349 new, it was pretty bloody good. And helpfully, I can now play the bass well enough so that demoing one in the middle of a crowded shop is no longer the cringe-inducing stumble through a pathetically easy bass staple that it used to be. No, now I cringe-inducingly stumble through a pathetically easy bassline that I came up with.

(A workmate of mine, upon reading the RF - poor guy - opined that the tagline should be "Guitars, girls, drinking and hats", instead of "Travels to the pub and back", and to be fair, he's right on the two least exciting points.)

Today, I went again to look at some flats. I saw a few nice ones, but of course, no flat is ever perfect. One of four things will be wrong with any given flat. It'll be either:

1. too expensive, or
   
2. too small, or
   
3. too far away, or
   
4. above a fishmonger and you'll like totally remember when your sister lived above a fishmonger in Marchmont and their flat completely smelt of fish the whole time
   

so you see my problem.

I've done nothing worthy

of writing about this week, apart from vegetate in front of films and spout bad chat afterwards. And look for flats, but trust me: writing here about that would turn the RF from merely dull to so boring that you'd hunt me down just to make the torrent of asinine, self-referential tedium stop. This is assuming you're not already trying to, I mean.

Anyway, the 5-second RF film criticism bonanza:

• The Aviator: Jesus. Three hours of my life I'll never get back. Too much CGI (would it have been all that hard to just build one or two of the planes? Surely we're fairly down with 60-year old technology by now?) and over-acting in abundance. There's only so long I'm willing to sit and watch a rather obvious and clumsy portrayal of someone going slightly mad with OCD.
  
• Sideways: genius. Like a middle-aged Swingers with wine. Excellent film, from start to finish. Low and high brow humour, acting so good it's almost imperceptible and a realism that I haven't seen for ages. Also, Paul Giamatti's performance, unlike Leonardo di Caprio's in The Aviator, is eminently Oscar-worthy.
  
• JFK: come on, you've seen this. Three hours actually worth watching, and apart from Costner getting all teary-eyed at the end, well-enough acted. It was almost good enough to make me drop everything and begin a one-man odyssey to bring the real Kennedy killers to justice. Almost. I think I made a cup of tea instead.
  
• Team America: World Police: also genius, in a jokes-about-cocks way. Takes the piss out of everyone. Puerile nihilism with puppets. And if that's not a ringing endorsement, I don't know what is.
  

That is all.