Nick Gibbins

Liveblogging Eurovision #5 (Turkey)

: “blimey – this isn’t your standard Turkish entry” Four piece guitar band playing pop with Indie Rock sensibilities (or perhaps the other way around). A bit Kaiser Chiefs.

Liveblogging Eurovision #4 (Iceland)

Not bad at all – energetic dancey stuff (: “a bit of a camp torchsong ballad”) I now have a mental image of a puzzled Eurovision viewer saying “blood sweat and tears? does that make any sense in English?”

Liveblogging Eurovision #2 (Croatia)

A bit reminiscent of the French entry that got nul points about a decade ago. Must be the accordion. “I was the first Internet ever / Sailing on ships with my music”. Special.

Liveblogging Eurovision #1

Bosnia and Herzegovina have my vote so far. Proof that there’s a twenty-year delay in popular music between the UK and the Balkans (no bad thing). Israel – boring, fast forwarded over it (having rewound to show B+H’s entry) Finland – METAL!!! “Where all the men ride forth / there the sheep cannot graze”. Timeless.

Adventures in parenting

While trying to excitedly tear a crust of bread to get at the Marmite thereon, the has just managed to slip and deliver a perfect backhand to his beaker of milk. There’s now a trail of milk that stretches from him, across the table, over my right arm, along the floor, over ‘s work bag, up the side of the arm chair, over the cushion, and down the other side – a good three metres. We’re either going to have to invest in tennis lessons, or some sort of magnetic device for holding the beaker down. Edited to add: he’s… Read More »Adventures in parenting

The Multiversity Experience

Some light reading for the academics on my flist – I’ve syndicated the Multiversity Experience blog on LJ as , which publishes purported excerpts from internal university communications – it’s along similar lines to Laurie Taylor’s Poppleton column in the THES, but more surreal.

Happy Birthday Marvin

Another year, and the birthday of the esteemed Marvin Fenderson (WINOLJ) rolls around again. I’d ask people to send him birthday wishes to marvin@totl.net, but he’s been a miserable git lately and probably won’t acknowledge you. I suspect that he’s still a bit sore over the failed move to New Zealand last year – Surrey is certainly second best. Probably ought to do something for him next year, given that it’s his 40th…

An imperfect world

Dammit. I would have got a perfect 5.0 on my teaching evaluation from my students, had one of them not given me a 4 (good) instead of a 5 (very good). I shall have to be satisfied with a near-perfect 4.89.