Turns out I'm a bit daft. I had added this site to the Is My Blog Hot or Not? website and turns out the reason it didn't work was because I hadn't done it right. But it works now, so if you want to give it a go feel free to do so. It's actually a pretty good way of finding new, interesting blogs. So far I've only bookmarked the one called Minimal Thought, but I'm sure there are plenty of others that are bookmark-worthy.

I really should sign up for this, but I'm not sure that American labels would be willing to ship promos to Europe. But I'll probably email them anyway just because it's a cool idea.

I found out today that unsurprisingly is an actual word. I was sure it was a made up word like unfamous or unsane. But apparently not, so unsurprisingly I'll be using it quite a bit in the future.

I was excited about seeing Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs for one day and now I’ve learned that they’ve cancelled their show. That totally blows!

I was at a barbeque with a bunch of friends last night and we wasted an hour discussing why men tend to be more fanatical about stuff (sports, music, stamps, or whatever) than women. I made the mistake of saying that my impression was that men tend to be more interested in politics than women and that was not well received. So we ended up discussing what fascinates women and men for an hour without getting further than agreeing on that men tend to be more fanatical about their interests.
While I was at the barbeque Zulu showed the pilot episode of Roseanne, which I taped. I used to watch Roseanne all the time in the 80s and while doing research for a paper on Seinfeld and sitcoms a couple of years ago I read a lot about the show. So I was curious to see the pilot, which I haven’t seen since it was originally broadcast. If you look at the show historically it’s pretty remarkable. It premiered in 1988 and went up against shows like The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Who’s The Boss, Growing Pains, Full House, and another unconventional sitcom Married… With Children. There’s really not a lot a show like Roseanne has in common with The Cosby Show and yet it was number two in the ratings in its first year and then shared first place with Cosby the following year.

The pilot is pretty funny and manages to showcase the brand of humour and problems, which the show continued to be about. John Goodman is a real standout as he continued to be on the show and while Roseanne has funny lines it’s obvious that he’s the real actor of the two. And it was funny to see George Clooney as Booker.

The latest thing to occupy the mind's of the blogging community is Googlegate. It started out innocently enough with Dead Kenny briefly mentioning that his site hadn’t been spidered for a while and suddenly people started emailing him saying that their sites hadn't been spidered, either (including myself). Now different theories are being hatched and phrases like A-List conspiracies and google conspiracy are being used, while Kenny is now referred to as The blogging world's answer to Woodward and Bernstein. We hope to have explaination on the way sooner rather than later.

Update: Another craze sweeping the world o' blog is the latest in Hot or Not: Is My Blog Hot or Not?. I tried to add the link to the template, but there seems to be a problem at Blogger with blogspot templates, so the link doesn't appear in the archives.

I just realized that if people, who are affected by Googlegate, would add that link to their weblogs, then it will eventually show up on Daypop. If that happened maybe we could get some sort of an explanation.

Saturday I was awoken by a phone call from a friend, who wanted to know if I'd like to stop by in an hour to help him move out of his apartment. It took me a bit longer to make it there, but I made it there to help him move all his stuff into his new place on the fourth floor (for some reason no buildings in this country has elevators), which took a couple of hours. That was my third moving gig in six weeks, so I'd appriciated it if people would quit moving for a while. Later that day there was a barbeque, Trivial Pursuit, and a lot of booze at a friend's house, so Sunday was as per usual spent on the couch searching for some kind of televised entertainment. Thankfully, the Danish footie season started this weekend, so there was a game on. And later on I watch highlights from local team AGF's 2-0 victory, which is sure to set the tone for a great season.

Another thing I saw was the first part of a reality show called The Bachelor. It was on American television a while ago, so if I wanted to find out who got married to whom I probably could, but I actually want to watch the second part. I've watched a lot of reality television although I usually get bored with it really quickly. But what fascinated me about The Bachelor is that you have 25 girls, who line up to date and then hopefully marry this guy. He gets to pick and chose between all these women and it looks like things will get pretty nasty in the second show. He started off as the perfect gentleman and seemed genuinely sad about having to send 10 of the girls home without getting an opportunity to get to know them well enough to make a well-informed decision (it was interesting to see, which girls he chose and which were dumped. Suffice it to say that the one, who looked like a Playmate made the cut, while the lawyer got booted.). The 15 remaining girls are then shipped off to a house, where they have to live together, while they get to date the guy. That in itself is a setup for disaster, because suddenly you have a house full of women, who are competing for the same guy. But if you are to believe the "next time on The Bachelor" bit the guy then continues to make out with the girls on the dates like he's been handed the keys to his own private harem. So he might get to marry one of these girls, but my guess is that he'll end up divorced faster than you can say Rick Rockwell.

I was supposed to start work on my thesis today and I did read two articles. But it is unbearably hot today, so I ended up reading Rolling Stone on the balcony instead of working. And now I'm on the way out to another barbeque.

There are a lot of bands playing here in August, but the one I'm looking forward to the most is Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. I've heard a couple of their songs, read a couple of articles on them, and they come highly recommended from David Fricke, so it ought to be a cool gig.

I watched The Filth & The Fury and it was fairly horrible. I really liked The Sex Pistols, when I was 16 and I’ve always admired their “We don’t give a toss” attitude. But since I saw them on their reunion tour in 1996, where they left the stage after fifteen minutes, because they got pelted with bottles, I’ve lost pretty much all respect for them and especially Johnny Rotten. He’s a self-indulgent and pompous guy, who keeps going on about stuff that happened 25 years ago. Supposedly, this movie shows the real Sex Pistols, which hasn’t been shown in previous documentaries about the band. Honestly, the only difference I could find was that they kept slagging Malcolm McLaren of without giving him a chance to retort. Other than that it was the same stories that we’ve heard a million times before. So that was a downer. The only thing that fascinated me was the relationship between Nancy and the band. Apparently, she was the Courtney Love of the time.

Then I watched the grunge documentary, which unfortunately wasn’t Hype!, but a VH-1 special. It was okay, but nothing special. I still get really depressed, when I see some of the Nirvana live footage, because you just get the feeling that Kurt hadn’t peaked artistically yet and had he not blown his head off he’d still be making incredible records today.

I’m listening to Superunknown right now and it’s just an amazing record. It’s definitely in my all-time top ten and it is remarkable how it doesn’t sound dated at all. Too bad people aren’t making records like that any more.

I was reading an entry on Roger Avary’s blog about his recent lunch with Geri Halliwell and he mentions that had he directed the Spice Girls movie it would have been very different from what it actually turned out to be. Well, in a weird turn of events Spice World, as the movie is called, was actually on telly tonight and I caught the last half hour of it. I think very few will be surprised to learn that it is pretty horrible and not at all funny. I was surprised that Avary had met with the Spice Girls let alone considered making their movie, but I guess he saw an opportunity to make a new version of Help! or something. What surprised me the most were the number of famous people who appear or have actual parts in the movie. How hard is it to see that a movie about five I-don’t-know-whats with no story made only to showcase their music is a terrible idea? Why would you want any part of that? The only remotely funny scene is where the five girls are summoned by a judge played by Stephen Fry and they’re sentenced to have their next record debut at number 175 on the charts and then disappear only to leave the girls doing talk shows in Taiwan for the rest of their lives. And the scene ends with Fry shouting “Now send in Gary Barlow”. So when the highlight of the movie is a reference to a former member of Take That I think you’ll agree that that just isn’t good enough.

I’m going to watch The Filth & The Fury now, which is a documentary about The Sex Pistols and later there’s a documentary about grunge, which may or may not be the movie Hype!. So musically things have taken a turn for the better.

Recently, I’ve read two interesting articles and I thought I’d link to them and comment on them here. After all that seems to be what weblogs are for. The first one is a review from The Village Voice of the new Sonic Youth album, which I found on Jennifer’s weblog.
The gist of the review is that a lot of bands tend to overstay their welcome and the most sensible thing to do is break up instead of continuing to make pointless and lame albums that no one wants to hear. In the reviewer’s opinion Sonic Youth now fits this description and since their latest album, Murray Street, is dull she would now prefer it if they would just break up already. Now, I don’t have an opinion on this matter. I don’t own any Sonic Youth records, I’ve only listened to their music on a couple of occasions, and the time I went to see them (Roskilde 1992) there were so many people in the tent I got lifted up of ground and the pressure of the masses pushed me out of the tent before I’d heard ten minutes of music. So I could care less if they broke up tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see her point. It’s not so often bands that I like I hope will break up, because I keep hoping they’ll make that one great record that’ll bring them back to their past glory (like The Wedding Album briefly did). It’s more bands, who I can see are just churning out records, so they can continue to justify touring with their Greatest Hits package I wish would just give it up. This goes especially for these new incarnations of 60s and 70s bands, where there are is only one original member of the group left and they don't own the rights to the band name, so now they're called Slade II or The Beach Boys Family.

However, I guess Metallica is a good example of a band I wish would just pack it in. All the crap surrounding their self-titled album pointed in the direction of them starting to suck and since then it’s been a long and depressing journey up Shit Creek (and I’ll never forgive them for that symphony record. Never!). And now it seems really hard to imagine them coming back after five years with new material that anyone would even care remotely about. So if James would just stay in rehab that would probably be the best solution for everyone.
But as much as I’m able to see the reviewer’s point I still think the review is a bit on the harsh side. And revealing that she’s only been a fan since 1995, when the band has been around since the early 80s, was a major tactical mistake, which a number of angry letters to the editor made sure to point out.

The second article came to me through the Douglas Coupland blog. It’s from the SF Gate website and is a general article about the weblog phenomenon. Most of it is the same as you’ve already seen in a hundred articles with interviews with the people you’d expect, but the opening paragraph is what caught my attention and kept me reading. Apparently, Paul Grabowicz, a professor at the UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, and Wired Magazine co-founder John Battelle are going to teach a class on blogging this fall, which is what brought this article on. The article isn’t at all specific about what will be taught in this class, but Grabowicz is quoted as saying that:

“… he hopes the class will merely give fledgling journalists another tool to report news in the most accurate, compassionate and conscientious way possible.
"Our hope is that the two communities, bloggers and mainstream reporters, can feed off each other," says Grabowicz. "Bloggers can learn the mechanics of newsgathering. Journalists can take in more discussion, criticism and analysis of news."
"Our intention isn't to co-opt anyone," he continues. "What we'd like instead is to change the one-way-street nature of journalism a little bit. Before, it was, 'We dictate, you listen.' Now we're listening as the public dictates."”

I need to find out a lot more about this. Obviously, by bloggers he isn’t referring to the droves of teenagers, who use their weblogs to ramble on about hot guys and how much math sucks. He must be referring to the ones, who use weblogs less as a journal and more as a soapbox and by doing that he has indicated that there are different kinds of blogs. It would be interesting to see, which blogs it is he feels the journalistic community could learn something from, because there certainly are blogs of different qualities. I mean just because it is now possible for every boob in the world with an internet connection to publish their thoughts on everything from porridge to politics doesn’t mean, and let’s be perfectly honest here, that those opinions are well-informed, interesting, or in any other way suited for publication. Hell, most of the stuff I write here is uninformed rubbish, which I should probably keep to myself, but where’s the fun in that? So I’ll look into this a bit more and get back to you.

I wish I could say that the reason I haven’t updated my blog in a week is because I’ve been busy curing cancer, saving the rain forest, or even something like reading or working. But honestly I’ve done none of those things. I’ve hung out with friends, watched all four days of The Open, and rented Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2002 and played it non stop for two days straight. The only things sensible and/or productive I done this week is work Friday and Wednesday and going to IKEA to buy a lamp and some shelves, which I haven’t gotten around to unpack yet. So there’s your explanation right there.

And for the record: That Tiger Woods game is incredible! And it’s a real time stealer, too. I played it for hours and now that I’ve returned it I desperately want to continue playing it. I have to figure out if I’ll be able to afford to buy it this week or wait and ask for it for my birthday in September. The graphics are very cool and there are so many features and courts I haven’t played yet that I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface so far. I got totally hooked and it is definitely one of the best games for PS2 I’ve played yet.

Watching The Open was a cool experience. The Danish players played really well, but Thomas Bjørn had problems early on on the last day and Søren Hansen never got the birdie he needed for first place towards the end. But even with that they both finished in 8th place, which is really impressive and it was well-deserved that Ernie The Big Easy Els won. It was also great to see Thomas Levet in such a good mood during the four-hole play-off and the sudden-death round, which he lost. And to top every thing off I learned that Tiger isn’t Tiger’s real name. Apparently, you can name you kids Ytossie and Rain, so as names go Tiger actually sounds like a pretty sane choice. But as it turns out the guy is actually called Eldrick Woods and thankfully Tiger is just a nickname.

Work was weird today. I was asked to shred a lot of documents, so I got hold of a shredding machine, but before I could set it up the technical supervisor suggested that I set everything up in a room with a TV. Or as he put it, “If you have to do shitty work, and this is shitty work, you might as well make the best of it”. Truer words have not been spoken, so I set the machine up, turned on MTV, brewed some coffee, and shredded what turned into eleven bags of shreds (which is, I’m told, approximately half of what an Arthur Andersen employee shreds during an average workday). MTV still sucks, but I got to see the new System of a Down video for Aerials, which I think is their best song, and there were a couple of other good tunes as well. And looking at a Diana King video while working sure beats not looking at one any day of the week (even if the music is terrible), so I can’t complain.

I helped a friend move into his new place today. A place that I actually had also helped him find. Peter had put an ad on his weblog and I passed it on to my friend, who was looking for a place to live. He interviewed for a room in the house and got it almost right away and he is very excited about living there. I have now met two of his future housemates and I think he'll fit in famously.

So today we moved his stuff and it was the quickest move in history. There were four of us in a car with a trailer and we moved all his stuff in less than two hours. Granted, he doesn't have a lot of stuff and practically no furniture, but two hours is still pretty quick. After moving we had pizza from the place across the street from my friend's new place and we spent quite a bit of time making fun of its name. They have a sign on the building advertising that they serve deep pan pizzas and real Italian pizzas. And also on the sign is the name of the place, which is Señor Pizza. Señor Pizza!?! Wouldn't it be Signore Pizza if these pizzas are so damn Italian? And aren't both names pretty horrendous anyway? There were other weird things about their decor and they screwed up our order, so we didn't get what you would call a great first impression of the place.

Then we got in the car and cruised around and then went to the beach. Normally, four guys driving to the beach and checking out girls would be a pretty cool scenario, but when your bumping to Elvis you kinda lose cool points. The only music in the car was some live album from the late 70s and although I enjoyed hearing Elvis singing Sweet Caroline and Suspicious Minds (which is my favourite Elvis song) I could have done without the rest of it. There is something about listening to Hound Dog and Love Me Tender, which makes me feel older than I am.

I actually went out and bought the Gangway record I talked about earlier and it's pretty great. On the off-chance that you've never heard a Gangway song I'd say they're similar to Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, and The Divine Comedy, which I think is a pretty smashing combo. So that and the new Doves album are getting a lot of rotations on the stereo.

I've been at work both yesterday and today and it has been surprisingly less boring than usual. I've been cataloguing papers handed in by students and while that is about as much fun as a German sitcom my workday was made a lot more interesting by the music choices made by of one of the secretaries. It started out pretty bad with Craig David followed by All Saints (who I actually secretly like), but then she started playing Danish bands Carpark North and Gangway. I haven’t heard Gangway in ages, so I had totally forgotten how amazing they are. Or should I say were, because they broke up a couple of years ago. Personally, I think they’re the closest we’ll ever come to a Danish version of Pet Shop Boys, but with funnier lyrics, and if I had any money I’d pick up their greatest hits album tomorrow.

That just goes to show how a boring job becomes a lot less boring, when you can hum along to lines like:

And if you should ever leave me
I know I would feel
as sad and lonely as Mr Carter
when he arranged that mission in Iran
and everything went wrong
everything that could go wrong went wrong

My buddy, Søren, took a lot of pictures at Midtfyns and I found a couple that I thought I should link to. Remember that picture that was supposed to be of me looking cool? Well, Søren actually took an even better picture of me being photographed trying to look cool. The other two pictures are from the Coldplay concert and I just thought they looked cool:
Coldplay1 and Coldplay2

I have a good friend, who's a good cook. And not only is he a good cook, but he seems to also really enjoy cooking, so he tends to make dinner whenever I visit him. Saturday night we got together four guys and had dinner and it was great. Tuna steaks and some weird potato dish with a sugary-vinegar dressing with onions was served with white wine and it was really nice. All night we heard great music (Tom Petty, REM, Jeff Buckley, Beastie Boys, and more) and after dinner we played two games of Risk. I haven't played Risk in years, but surprisingly I wasn't wiped out or anything like that. I wasn't home until after 4, because I hung around after the other two guys left and talked for a bit. It was a fun night and nice to just sit around and talk for a change instead of running from café to café getting blasted.

Today I watched Singles again. And that was it. But then what more could you possibly want from a day really?

Football season starts in September, but the first pre-season games will be played in about four weeks. So it's time to get down with the Fantasy Leagues and the only free one I could find is the NFL Fantasy 2002 game. I've set up a league, but according to the rules there needs to be 12 players in a league, so if you want to join send me an e-mail. I've sent out a couple of invites already, but there is definitely room for more people, so come join the fun. If you need some tips for organizing your team check out Fantasy Insights, who've specialized in predicting which players will be the most valuable on fantasy teams.

I've just set the thing up, so I haven't even checked out the rules and so on yet. But my plan for today is to pop on some Tool, make some coffee and figure out, how the whole thing works. If you've played the NFL Fantasy before feel free to write me with tips. Or if you know a better game I'd like to hear from you as well.

I was checking out Daypop and today's most popular place to link to is blogChalking (mixing small letters with capital letters is so 1997!), so I checked it out. Seems it's a way of keeping track of the location of bloggers inspired by Warchalking. So in an attempt to stay in the loop I signed up, which means I have to post the following to my site:

Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: Danish, Denmark, Aarhus, Aarhus North, John, Male, 26-30!

What this will do for my site or for the rest of the world is yet to be determined, but I guess we'll find out later.

I found this article about Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. Apparently, CNN will start broadcasting a Global Edition every Saturday and Sunday with highlights from the show beginning this September. I think this is great, but I was surprised by a remark made by CNN International spokesman Nigel Pritchard:

"The Daily Show has no topicality internationally and no relevance for an audience outside the U.S."

What the hell is that supposed to mean? And the genius continues:

"We like the format of the show and Jon is a very good host . . . but we're using the style of the show. It's not because of Jon but because of the program."

So the CNN show will consist of interviews with semi-famous tv stars, but Jon's commentaries about tax laws, elections, the NRA, and so on won't appear, because they have no relevance for an audience outside the U.S.. And I guess that also means that we won't be seeing Lewis Black ranting and screaming, either. If I wanted to see poorly conducted interviews with a bunch of brainless nobodies I'd watch Leno, so this seems about as smart as John Rocker's comments about the New York subway system.

I went through hundreds of photos taken at the Midtfyns Festival and found a couple you may or may not find interesting:

Me writing J-Fo on a cup (Notice the snazzy Aqua t-shirt)
Jens Unmack of Love Shop
Jez from Doves
Jimi from Doves
Jonatha Brooke all by her lonesome
Jonatha again
Søren from Saybia
Søren again
Long legs and big smiles
Matt is such a rock star
Muse's Matt Bellamy again
Garbo: Now with umbrellas
Garbo up close
Chris Martin of Coldplay
That hottie from Briskeby. (Ps. Hummel Rules!)

Turns out Wil saw the same ballgame as I did.

The weather here is nuts! It's pouring down again and today's thunderstorm is on its fourth hour. I'm getting a little nervous as I have my TV and computer on and I'm not sure, how my insurance covers if they blow up. But I figure since I've already experienced lightning hitting my apartment building once, it probably won't happen to me again.

I managed to break my phone line tonight and didn't notice for about an hour. The phone line is connected to an extension chord with a plastic gadget and somehow I managed to place a box on it and wreck it. I don't know the first thing about fixing wires, but I've managed to connect the two cables again, so both my phone and internet connection are up again (my first attempt made the phone work, but there was and occasional beep, which made my computer refuse to connect to the internet). I've done a pretty shabby job of fixing it, so tomorrow I'll need to get one of those plastic things with the screws you use, when you need to connect two wires. How obvious is it that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about?

Both my sister and my brother stopped by to watch Blow and although we all thought Johnny was cool and Paul Reubens was fun, we didn't find the movie too captivating. And we noticed that the movie and Spy Game, which we watched last night, were edited in a style reminiscent of how Soderbergh edits his movies. Obviously, the funky cuts and zoom cuts are inspired by movies from the 60s and 70s, but Soderbergh is the one (atleast to my knowledge) who re-introduced them. Anyway, the movie was okay and had some fun stuff, but like Boogie Night and Rock Star the movie was interesting, while things were going well and less interesting, when the shit starts hitting the fan.

I'm watching an All Star baseball game right now and it's the second game I've watched this week. Turns out that one of the sports channels I have shows baseball games, so now I'll try to check that channel once in a while to see if they'll show a Yankees or Orioles game on occasion. I don't know a lot about baseball, but I like baseball movies and I'm fascinated by all the stories about the Brooklyn Dodgers, DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, and Mickey Mantle, so I've always wanted to get into baseball. But since it's been impossible to watch games it's been impossible to seriously follow the sport. It was the same with American Football, but thankfully Danish channel Zulu started broadcasting a game week two years ago, so now I follow that religiously.

Seconds after I had posted the last entry I went by Tinka's blog. Turns out I'm not the only one in Denmark, who is struggling with the heat (and saw Billy Idol: Behind the Music yesterday?) and decided to write about it. Apparently, the reports of the death of her blog were, in the words of Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated.

I'm in such a slump right now. I came back home from the festival about 2 AM Monday and since then I've done nothing but sleep and watch TV. I haven't even shaved or washed my funky, mud ridden clothes yet. I don't know why I'm so exceptionally lazy right now, but the fact that it is unbearably hot and humid outside probably has something to do with it. My apartment is extremely funky and even though the door to the balcony has been open all day I'm still sweating bullets.
There was a huge thunderstorm last night and since I live on the third floor I had a pretty good view of it. Lightnings were hitting stuff all over the place and every couple of minutes the sky would light completely up and there'd be a huge bang. So instead of doing anything productive my brother and I rented Blow, Spy Game, and Soul Survivors. I'm watching Blow by myself tonight, but we saw the other two last night.

Spy Game is a decent enough thriller starring Brad Pitt and Robert Redford about a spy, who gets caught and thrown in a Chinese prison. After hating Pitt for doing movies like A River Runs Through It and Legends of the Fall he's turned into one of my favourite actors. Don't get me wrong, I haven't seen Meet Joe Black or The Mexican (and I'm in no rush to), but he's still made enough good movies to make up for a couple of stinkers. And both him and Redford were good enough to add some life and charm to this at times too complex story.

However, Soul Survivors is another story. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie this incomprehensible and stupid. To be totally honest the main reason we rented this waste of celluloid was that it features Eliza “Evil Slayer” Dushku and because we were curious to see Wes Bentley in something other than American Beauty (and because my brother and I try to catch anything, which features either Owen or Luke Wilson), but neither could do anything to make this piece of crap worth watching. I won’t even waste time trying to re-tell the nonexistent storyline, but let’s just say it makes Boxing Helena look like Citizen Kane. Hopefully, Blow will turn out to be a little better.

My friend, Jan, has pulled together all the photos which were taken at the festival and made them available online. I'll go through them soon and pull out some of the best for you. But for now I'll just link to a portrait of me, which was taken on our way to see Love Shop. The photographer wanted me to look cool, so in order to do that I had to turn my head to the point where I was about to pull a muscle in my neck (and hold that pose, please!). It turned out okay, I guess, and the dark skies in the background certainly adds to the gloominess of it all.

There isn't really any music on today, so I've been working on the reviews I had to write for last nights show. And they're all online now rated on a scale from one to six with the other ones I've written this week:

Rival Schools (****)
Gomez (****)
A (*)
Muse (*****)
Doves (**)
Isaac Hayes (***)
The Calling (**)
Dear (****)

Add to that the interviews I did with Doves and Rival Schools and I think I've had a pretty productive week.

I saw a lot of Danish bands last night and did a little partying, so it was a nice enough evening. Today, we finish the last articles and then in a couple of hours we start packing. We have a ton of computer stuff we need to pack and cram into a truck before we can leave. But hopefully I'll be home sometime after midnight, and since I don't have to work then I don't really mind if we get back later than that. It's been a fun week with some cool concerts thrown into the mix. For me personally the highlights were the interviews and seeing Muse, Rival Schools and Coldplay live, so in conclusion I'll say that it's been fun being here even though the weather has been unstable to say the least.

Just came back from the Jonatha Brooke show and it was a very nice experience. Her band had gotten stuck in LA, because the airport had been closed because some disgruntled ex-employee had come back and shot some people. So she performed solo and I think it was probably better that way. There weren't that many people in the tent, but the people there seemed to know her stuff. And when one guy called out a song title she just went Okay! and played it. We sat on the grass for most of the show and hung out, so that was cool.

Before that I was at a stand-up show with three Danish comedians. The last one was Lasse Rimmer, who is the Danish Alex Trebek. Okay, so not exactly, but he is the host of the Danish version of Jeopardy. But he also writes on a sitcom, he does stand-up, and he writes a weblog in Danish. All three comedians were funny, but Rimmer was the most highly anticipated. He did a good job and dealt well with the hecklers. Even when he asked the crowd a question and some guy who formed his answer in the form of a question. He did a bit about deer caught in the headlights of a car, which reminded me of an old Eddie Izzard joke about evil pilotfish, who swim two by two to scare the other fish into thinking there's a car coming at them. It was funny stuff and a nice break from all the music.

I found two nice pictures I wanted to share with you: Walter Schriefels (Rival Schools) and Chris Martin (Coldplay)

I saw Isaac Hayes last night and he's a cool cat. I'm not a big soul fan, but he has a cool-ass voice and every thing he says oozes sex. And he played Theme from Shaft and Chocolate Salty Balls, so that was alright.

I've been blogging a lot, but because Blogger was down yesterday I haven't been able to publish until now. It was pretty frustrating, but maybe that'll teach me that it's worth it to shell out a couple of bucks for the Pro version.

I have a very loose schedule today, so I'll go see Lasse Rimmer do some stand-up in half an hour and later today I'll go see Jonatha Brooke, Junior Senior, The Calling, Dear, and Superheroes. I have to review The Calling, who I don't really know, but chances are their pretty terrible. But we'll see I guess.

And finally here's a snippet of our breakfast conversation the other day:

[We were talking about my deflated mattress]
Søren: You don't need a pump. Just grab it and ftttp, ftttp, ftttp, blow it up
Jan: Just get on your knees and get the job done
Me: Yeah, that wouldn't be the first time I've done that

I just came back from seeing the best Danish live act ever. They're called Love Shop and I've seen them a hundred times and they're always in super form with a couple of new, fun stories they enjoy sharing. They have a truckload of great songs and they're one of those bands that always have people singing along to their stuff. And this time was no different, so it was awesome as ever.

My interview with Doves is available now (Modem - ADSL). I thought it went pretty well and we got to talk about both their records and some other stuff. But when I was at their concert a guy from the record label had stopped by and told my editor that the guys thought the interview had been great. Apparently, they hate giving interviews, but they had told the label guy that this had been the best interview they'd given in ages and that it was obvious that I was well prepared. To me that's a big deal.

Actually, it's a huge deal. I've done a lot of interviews and I tend to only interview bands that I like. So when I get the impression (or am specifically told) that the artist thought being interviewed was fun and not a boring chore, then that's a big deal to me. I always try to do as much research as possible and hopefully find a couple of questions they haven't been asked a million times before. And if they enjoy being interviewed, then usually the interview becomes more interesting and then everyone is happy. So knowing that they enjoyed it enough to tell their record label people about it means a lot to me.

I saw No Doubt put on a decent show last night. I liked Tragic Kingdom, when it came out, but I don't know their newer stuff. I hate the two new singles, so I was mainly there to see them and hear Just a Girl and Spiderwebs. I guess if you're a fan then it was a good show, but I was slightly underwhelmed. Like Seinfeld's girlfriend once said about his act: "It all just seemed like a bunch of fluff".

I've seen nothing today, but I've interviewed Jez and Andy from Doves and that'll be available later today. Watch out for a couple of choice remarks about Tim Henman and info about upcoming dates. You can also read my review of A (who were shit) and Muse (who were great). Both are in Danish, but if you check out the Muse review you can watch some live clips from the Hulabaloo DVD.

I'm off to see Doves now, then some Danish bands, and tonight I'll go see Isaac Hayes. And he better play Theme from Shaft.

I saw Muse play today and have established that Matt Bellamy is absolutely nuts. As always he gave it his all and jumped effortless from playing beautiful piano lines to screeching guitar solos to singing in the wildest falsetto ever. Origin of Symmetry is a cracker of an album and the songs work even better live. Muse absolutely rule and if you haven't heard them yet you should give them a chance (they don't even play the dreadful Unintended anymore). Hopefully I'll be able to and some pictures from the concert later.

More stuff to check out:
Coldplay performing three tracks from their forthcoming album. It's a world premiere and I'm passing it along to you.
The entire Jon Spencer Blues Explosion concert (lasts about an hour).
My review of Gomez (in Danish).

We've taken a bunch of pictures already, so I've collected a bunch of links to the best ones:

How we got our gear from the truck to the press camp
This is what the roads are like
Me pretending to work
The main (and muddy) stage
Our headquarters
Wednesday morning
Our studio
Paving the streets with wood
Ben from Gomez
Tom from Gomez
Turin Brakes
Rival Schools
The last punk in Denmark
Jon Spencer
Jon Spencer rockin'

I got to see both Gomez and Coldplay last night and both were pretty good. I've seen Gomez a couple of times before and as always they were in an extremely good mood. They're a fun bunch and they have some great songs. Unfortunately, the weather was pretty bad, but still they managed to get people excited during the first couple of songs. They played too much new stuff in the middle part of the show, so it died down a bit, but the ending was smashing as they played Here Comes the Breeze, Get Myself Arrested, Ruff Stuff, Revolutionary Kind, and Whipping Piccadilly was the last song. So considering the circumstances the show was actually very enjoyable.

Coldplay was the last band to play here last night and they put on a pretty good show. They'd been out to look at the stage early in the morning and had been sure that this would be the worst show they'd ever play. But not surprisingly people had chosen to ignore the mud and had shown up in droves. So the band were really happy that so many had shown up and it showed. Obviously, the feedback on the new stuff weren't that strong, but Shiver, Trouble, and Yellow were well received and so was the new single. I don't know if it was the weather or the fact that Coldplay don't have enough great songs that stopped the concert from being fantastic, but as concerts go it was still pretty good.

The Rival Schools interview I did is online now and so is my review of the concert (unfortunately, it's in Danish).

Bring It On:
We just got permission to stream the Gomez concert, so in 15 minutes you'll be able to go to musik.dk and watch them play live.

It's absolutely pouring out and in fifteen minutes right now the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion will enter the large stage here at Midtfyns. My guess is that Jon will be pretty lonely out there as he is virtually unknown here and with weather like this I doubt anyone will be interested in checking out new stuff. But if you have a bitchin' internet connection you can watch the show online at musik.dk (links are in the corner to the right).

I've had a great day so far. I did an interview Walter Schriefels from Rival Schools, which went really well. I'll link to the interview, when we get it online, but until then you can watch a clip of us talking before the interview.

I also saw them play this afternoon and they rocked. The gave shout-outs to Danish model Helena Christensen, the little mermaid, and Danish money because it hasn't been turned into European money yet. The played Good Things and Used For Glue and most of the other songs of the record and although they had a shitty time slot and no one knew them they made the best of it.

My friend, Søren, interviewed Jon from Coldplay and that interview is available here in two qualities: ADSL - Modem.

He shot some clips from the Turin Brakes and Rival Schools shows:
[Turin Brakes - Windows Media: ADSL - Modem]
[Turin Brakes - Windows Media: ADSL - Modem]

[Rival Schools i Windows Media: ADSL - Modem]
[Rival Schools i Windows Media: ADSL - Modem]

Check out the clips and check back for more as the John Fogde Blues Explosion continues.

Message in a Bottle:
My blog is in the shitter right now, so there is no author tag and the comments don't work either. If you have questions about the festival or you have an interesting story or questions for some of the bands feel free to write me at john@warhol.dk or leave me a message in the tagboard in the left column.

We’ve been down here at the Midtfyns Festival since 1 o’clock and we seem to have everything under control. I’m blogging this from a laptop with a wireless internet connection in the middle of a muddy field with a cup of coffee in front of me and a mouth full of chocolate biscuits. It’s slightly surreal, but a lot of fun. Everyone is in a really good mood although the weather is supremely shitty. There’s mud everywhere, but as long as we can sit here out of the rain it doesn’t really matter.

We’ve already gotten a bunch of interviews lined up and apparently we’ve secured a world premiere of some of the tracks from the new Coldplay record, which will be released in August. We’ll make them available online on Thursday, so I’ll add a link as soon as we’ve got them ready. We should also get some stuff from the forthcoming Muse DVD, but more on that later.

We have so far been promised interviews with Muse, Coldplay, Doves, and Rival Schools, and I’ve been asked to interview the last two bands, which I’m pretty excited about. We’ll shoot the interviews with a digital video camera and then make them available online as soon as possible. And since I’ll be interviewing in English everybody should be able to understand what’s going on. I have to start preparing some questions for the interviews now, but if you have any questions to the bands or any interesting titbits of information you’d like to share feel free to leave a message in the comments.

There seems to be some problems with the author tag on the Blogspot sites, but hopefully it’ll get fixed soon. But it’s still me, John Fogde, who’s writing, and I’ll be adding a lot more about the goings-on here at the festival later.

I was at a wedding this weekend and it was a strange, but nice experience. I went to the island of Samsø Friday by myself and ended up at the place we were supposed to stay around 6 PM. It was a place, which is normally used to house schoolchildren visiting the island, so it's like a camp or something. So there were dormitories with bunk beds, which was a little odd, but not that odd, when you're used to travelling and staying in youth hostels. An hour later we went to pick up my friend, who was also invited to the wedding, which made me a lot more comfortable. To explain the situation I'll just mention that the groom started at university with my friend and I and we were the only university friends, who were invited. This also means that I don't know any of his other friends that well. I met a lot of them at the bachelor party, but I don't feel like I really know them. So after my friend got settled we ditched the others and went to get dinner and beer. When we got back we sat in the sofas in the dining room, while the others sat in the kitchen. Some drifted back and forth and talked to us, but mainly we were just the two of us. I don't think we intentionally wanted to be asocial, but we felt comfortable just being the two of us and not sitting in the kitchen, where people were smoking and playing cards. So we sat around drinking beer and listened to The Pixies, Manu Chao (a big hit with this crowd), and New Order until around 2 AM, when it was time to hit the sack.

Saturday morning was spent getting ready and watching a bit of Wimbledon before leaving for the wedding. My friend and I wore similar shirts by Danish designer Mads Nørgaard that are reversed in colour. So mine is white with light-blue ruffles and his is the opposite. We didn't wear jackets, so people thought we were a bit strange. Everyone else wore suits you could as easily have worn at a funeral (except the best man who wore a beige jacket and clown pants. Honest!), so we thought we'd do something different. A girl, who by the way wore a completely see-trough dress, mentioned that we looked like those two guys from Dumb & Dumber and realizing she'd just called us dumb pointed out that she meant because of the shirts. Ha ha! Very funny. At least my underwear wasn't showing.

We walked to the church, which was located on the top of a hill with a very picturesque view of the island. It was quite windy, but other than that it was a nice day and the setting for the wedding couldn’t have been better. Inside were about 60 people and after a few minutes the bride arrived dressed in peach coloured dress. The actual wedding lasted 35 minutes, which I thought was extremely swift. We sang three hymns and there was an exchange of vows and rings, but what took up most of the time was the sermon. The priest had known the bride’s family for a long time, so he was able to add a personal touch, which was nice. But the gist of the speech reminded me of a cross between John Donne’s No Man is an Island and Hedwig’s The Origin of Love just to give you an idea of my frame of reference.

After the ceremony and having waited for the newlyweds to drive away we wandered down to the restaurant. My friend and I have travelled together quite a bit, so at this point we should know that we are disorganized idiots. Everybody else drove, but we wandered into the town only to realize we had no idea what the restaurant was called or where it was located. We walked by two restaurants we were sure weren't the right ones, then wandered back a bit only to change our minds and wander back the other way again. We finally noticed the priest drive by us and followed him until we found the restaurant. This led us to champagne, hors d’oeuvres, and watching the happy couple unpack a barrage of presents. The rest of the evening consisted of fantastic food and wine, a lot of songs and even more speeches, and drinking until 6 in the morning.

I won’t go into details about what happened at the party, but I have to mention this old guy, who made the remark of the evening. I’d noticed him early on, because he had a cigar hanging on his lower lip like a dopey Clint Eastwood. But it was the hearing aids, which really made me notice him. They were huge and grey with big plastic things going into his ears. Now I don’t want to make fun of the disabled, but I thought it was funny that he had those bad boys turned up so loud that the feedback they created distracted the chef twice, while he was presenting the menu. I didn’t sit near him, but I was later told that he had rambled incoherently throughout most of the night not even stopping while people were giving their speeches. But he really through in a zinger as the sister of the groom was rapping up her speech and people were getting on their feet to toast the happy couple. She said that she’d end her speech with asking people to join her in a toast and in a second of complete silence the old guy says “Thankfully! Now we don’t have to listen to more of her babble!”. The women next to him grabbed his arm and undoubtfully told him to can it, while the rest of us made the toast. And immediately after dinner he was escorted out and driven home. It was pretty embarrasing, but also really funny.

Sunday we had brunch in the bride’s parents’ summer house, where we also watched the World Cup final. I didn’t feel too hung over, but in the car down to the ferry and especially standing in line I got a bit queasy and the foul stench of seaweed didn’t make things any better. But I made it home alright and spent the rest of the night in front of the television.

To wrap this wedding thing up I’d like to add that I thought we had an excellent time this weekend. The party was arranged to perfection and I got to talk to a lot of nice people. I was fun telling the groom’s parents about some of the things we’d done together and it was nice to see the bride and groom so happy. It was a unique experience and something I won’t forget for a long time.

Today has been spent sleeping, watching Henman fumble his way through his fourth game, and packing. I’m leaving for the festival tomorrow at 8 in the morning, so I need to get all my gear ready. I’ve been listening to Rival Schools all night and I’m really looking forward to seeing them on Wednesday. I have no idea what we’re going to be doing at the festival yet, but I guess we’ll have a meeting tomorrow to sort things out. I’ll do my best to update about my musical adventures and maybe I’ll even be able to link to some photos and interviews. I’m sure it’ll be an awesome week. Good things are indeed coming our way.