Idle Thoughts and John Cooper Clarke

I've been pondering all sorts of useless things in my half sleep this week for some strange reason. And in my half sleep I have been consciously reminding myself to blog about it later in the day when I am awake. Buggered if I can remember anything now - everything seems so clear in the demi-sleep of 04:45am. One of the things that popped into my head was why we have 3 different ways of accounting for shoe size in the world. Why do we? It took me years to work out whether I was a 37 or 38 and always secretly wanted to be a 39. Why do we have English 1,2,3,4,5, etc, European 35,36,37 etc and then there are US sizes which are half a size down I think. How did that all come about? Answers on a grain of rice please. I'm dying to know.


There is an excellent piece on how crap Katie Melua's lyrics are over at Urban Woo's. I commented by posting up a poem titled I Wanna Be Yours by genius poet legend John Cooper Clarke by way of a point that lyrics that are made up of analogies can be very powerful - unless of course you are Mike Batt ex-wombler and chief lyricist for Katie Crap. This led me to an inevitable foray into youtube. I found one of my favourite JCC pieces from 1979 music show called Something Else - god I loved that programme mainly because they had a lot of punk bands on playing live that no one else would air. In 1979, Something Else broadcast John Cooper Clarke in a urinal reciting 'Twat'. I was going to post it up but some 'twat' has put silly noises over all the rude and swear words - it is utterly ruined. So you will have to make do with this instead. It is the opening number to a film by Nick May called Ten Years In An Open-Necked Shirt about punk performance poets. Midnight Shift by John Cooper Clarke accompanied by Linton Kwesi Johnson's band (I think).



Stop Press: we have a new candidate at Munterspace this week - click here for extreme munterness