I went downtown to buy a track jacket today, but instead of the funky, old-school white and black Puma jacket I originally wanted I went with a cool red and black Fred Perry jacket. I haven't bought clothes in ages, so this month I decided it was time to pick something up. After shopping I went to a new bar/restaurant called Watch, which has been advertising with a special Ryder Cup event. They had the tournament on on screens everywhere and some of them had a different camera angles than the signal sent out to the viewers at home, so we would watch that during commercials. It was pretty cool and people actually cheered, when the players were putting, so there was a real atmosphere going on down there.

But besides that I've been working with my robot dog today. I've taught it my name and gotten it to respond to a couple of commands. I can make it walk in different directions and make it make certain noises. There's still some stuff I haven't figured out, but I'll work with it again tomorrow before the players head out for the final round. Besides the dog I've also borrowed a camera, so I've taken some pictures around town today which I might put up eventually.

As previously mentioned Jon Stewart has gone global and he's on my television right now making fun of Bush, so I gots to go.

Remember the saga of the robotic dog? Well, it will continue this weekend as I’ve been asked to come pick the thing up on Friday, so I can play around with it for a while. The boys over at Innovation Lab are having some kind of conference on Tuesday and they asked me to stop by with the dog and show off how it works. They haven’t had time to figure the thing out themselves, so since I already “worked” with it once they figured I might be interested in spending some time with it again and then do some kind of presentation on Tuesday. I’m pretty curious to see how well the voice recognition works and how much you can teach it, so I said yes right away. So that means I’ll probably be on the floor trying to teach the damn mutt some tricks this weekend, while following the Ryder Cup team kick some Yankee ass.

Last night I went down to see The Czars and unsurprisingly the place was more than half empty. And it seemed like a lot of people had shown up to see local act Yellowish and not the main act. But it was a good show all the same. Singer John Grant is a big Shannon Hoon-looking mother with long, braided hair and the full flannel getup. He has a killer voice that’s deep, powerful, soulful and just generally pretty outstanding. They mixed styles a lot and would jump from alt-rock to blues to country, but most of the time they played moody and atmospheric tunes carried by the dreamy vocals and melancholic arrangements. Therefore it was the more annoying that I eventually had to go up to some people I know and tell them to shut the hell up. They’d been standing with their backs turned at the bar and talked through the concert oblivious to the music and the fact that they were getting angry stares all the time. I hate it when people at concerts (or the cinema) talk through the show. It just drives me nuts and I’ve on several occasions told people to can it, because it bugs me so much. If you’re at a packed rock show it’s just annoying to the people standing in the crowd. But when you go see a band play quiet music in front of an almost empty house then it’s annoying to the band as well and it just pisses me off that people have so little respect for the performers and the paying customers.

After the show the band hung out and sold merchandise. I think it’s really cool when the band sells their own stuff instead of having some roadie do it. That way people can have their CDs signed and talk to them if they want. I just picked up their latest, The Ugly People Vs The Beautiful People, and I’m glad I did. I’ve been listening to it today and it’s just a beautiful record. I’d heard some of their songs before, but hearing a full album after you’ve heard a lot of the songs live is usually always a cool experience, because you already feel very familiar with the music. They’re playing Copenhagen tonight and will then be touring all over Europe until the end of October, so if you have a chance you should check them out.

I just found out that Idlewild will be supporting Coldplay in November. I haven’t heard anything by them yet, but have heard a lot of great things about them, so I’ll have to check them out before the show (I actually went to idlewild.com to learn more about them, which is a fun experience if you think you’re about to learn about a rock band).

Tonight Arsenal are playing PSV Eindhoven, which ought to be a good game. Hopefully, Thierry Henry will wear a t-shirt congratulating the newlywed Mr and Mrs Arseblogger and show it off, when he scores his first goal. That would be something.

I’ve been out partying twice this week, so sleeping and drinking has been pretty much all I’ve done since Wednesday. Saturday I went down to my favourite club, Club Drive, and ended up dancing around to old favourites by That Dog, The Smiths, and Madness. The club wasn’t packed for once, but I knew a lot of people there (including some I hadn’t seen in a while), so it was a pretty awesome night. The only downside was that when we walked home sometime after 5AM it was pouring down so heavily that I was completely soaking wet and I had to stop four times to wipe the hair gel out of my eyes (maybe I need to cool it with the styling products).

Tomorrow night I’m going down to check out The Czars at Voxhall. I’m looking forward to it, but I have a feeling that not a lot of people will show up on a Tuesday night to see a band that hasn’t sold 50 records here. But hopefully I’ll be proven wrong.

I subscribe to Rolling Stone magazine and although the magazine has taken a more celebrity-driven approach to journalism (check out the cover for issue 906) they still produce great articles. In issue 903 there was the story of the Russian kid, who immigrated to USA, started dating a stripper, got involved with people selling growth hormones, and eventually got kidnapped and killed. In issue 904 there was a story about Ernest Hemingway’s son, Gregory, who was a cross-dresser and eventually had a sex-change operation, he was married three times (once after the operation), and he was committed and on all kinds of medication. The article also briefly mentions what is known as The Curse of the Hemingways and lists more than a handful family members, who committed suicide and a couple who died of drug overdoses. But the creepiest article was the one in issue 905, which is about people, who pay to be kidnapped and humiliated. There’s a brief article here about the guy who arranges these kidnappings, but the RS article is written by a guy, who actually went through the kidnapping event, which adds a very disturbing perspective. So I don’t mind that they put Jennifer Love Hewitt, The Vines, or Asia Argento on the cover as long as they keep publishing articles like the ones I’ve just mentioned.

Lastly, I want to say thanks to Alyse, who runs the beautifully designed website Bolt of Blue, for calling me fucking rad and directing so many people over to this site. That was almost too kind.

Are weblogs sexist seems to be what is on the minds of people right now. Tom Coates over at Plasticbag and Kenny over at Parallax View have mentioned it this week and as far as I can tell it started here, then went here and here and here, and then got picked up at Blogroots. Like most people I hadn't given this any thought (I link to 25 blogs, 6 written by women), so the only comment I can bring to the table is that maybe there are more men blogging and therefore more people link to them. One of the points made is that the women discussing this want acceptance (ie links) from prominent bloggers, but if they get noticed it's only when they write about sex or something like that. I can see how that would suck, but I think since most bloggers (male or female) don't get linked to by the most popular blogs at all, it will be hard for them to gain much sympathy. I mean I feel left out because I don't live in San Francisco, where all the cool bloggers live, who know each other and go to fray day together. But like Bruce Hornsby once said: "That's just the way it is".

But speaking of female bloggers I will mention that I visited Jennifer's Fireballs & Tsunami today and left trying to figure out, what was so funny about the slogan Ithaca is Gorges. While searching for hints (turns out there are a lot of gorges in Ithaca) I found a website with bumper stickers from the Ithaca area. This one is my favourite:

Is the Trucks song It's Just Porn, Mum a hit in your country yet? It's pretty stupid, but the video made me laugh.

Update: Apparently, there are some template problems over at Blogger today, so until that is fixed you can see my favourite bumpersticker here. Oh, does anyone know what's going on with Roger Avary's blog? I get asked for login and password, when I try to access it.

This might only interest Danish readers (and maybe not even them), but here goes anyway.

The fifth season of Survivor (or The Robinson Expedition as it’s called here) is currently airing every Monday night on Danish TV3. However, this year it’s called Robinson: The Final Encounter, because the contestants are all people, who’ve been on the show before. This year they’ve decided to have a boys team fight against a girls team, they’ve taken some of the contestants and put them on a special castaway island, and each team has appointed a chief, who has immunity and can’t be voted off the island. It’s all mighty exciting and whatever happens on the show is sure to make tabloid headlines every week.

The reason I’m mentioning this is that the big story after Monday night’s episode is that TV3 had apparently told one of the contestants that his team mates had lost a contest on purpose, so they could vote him off the island, and if he didn’t challenge the chief to a duel (that’s the only way the chief can be kicked off the island) then he was dead meat. According to the paper he’d refused to do that and therefore the tribal council meeting was changed, so instead of having the contestants vote for the person they wanted to leave the island, they now had to vote for a person they thought should stay. That meant that the person with the least votes would get kicked off the island and because the members of the little conspiracy got confused they forgot to vote for one of their own saving the aforementioned contestant.

The contestant in question is the notorious Biker-Jens, who appeared in the first instalment of the show and has since then hosted several TV-shows including some for TV3. And there’s the rub. TV3 are now being accused of giving him an unfair advantage, because he used to be on their payroll. Obviously, their stand point is that when alliances are formed they have the right to shake things up a bit by changing the rules. However, in the articles I’ve seen they don’t mention whether or not they actually warned Biker-Jens before the tribal council meeting, but if they were going to change the voting process anyway I don’t see why it would be necessary to warn him.

I thought it was fairly entertaining to see the contestants, who thought they’d been really slick by losing on purpose, get screwed over at the tribal council meeting. But the weirdest thing was how the host, Thomas Mygind, behaved. He acted like a school teacher who’d just found out the entire class had cheated on an exam. He was very disappointed and tried to get them to admit that they’d lost on purpose and when they lied him straight in the face he looked really miffed.

From a production perspective I thought changing the rules was pretty brilliant. In order to make the show work you need people who hate each other to compete side by side for as long as possible, because if they’re all good friends all the time and each goodbye is teary and sweet, the show gets boring in no time. Or should I say even more boring, because the concept is growing really thin. I saw the last half of the first season, the entire second season, and parts of the third season, but totally ignored the show last year. You’d think the show would gain momentum now since it’s packed with old favourites, but seeing as they’ve mainly chosen the most annoying and bullheaded people to reappear on the show I’m usually more annoyed than entertained by the show. But if I’m in Monday nights I’ll have it on while doing something else and see the most interesting bits. And I’ll probably keep watching just to see some of the people I can’t stand get voted off, because they take this shit so seriously that it’ll be sweet to at least see some of them lose this thing.

I’m not really a big book guy. I’m a big music guy and a big television guy. And I used to be a big movie guy mainly because I reviewed movies for a few years, but I just don’t seem to get around to reading more than a handful books a year. The reason I mention this is that I finally finished Tom Wolfe’s excellent A Man in Full, which has been sitting on the table next to my bed for almost a year. In my defense I’d like to add that it’s 787 pages long written in a very complex style (well, maybe not complex, but very repetitive style then) and I’ve read two or three other books besides this one in that time span. So it’s not that I’m dim or anything. I just don’t get around to reading in a book every day and therefore I don’t seem to be able to plough through stacks of book every year. You’d think with my fondness for drinking coffee while lying on my couch that I could get plenty of reading done, but for some reason I always end up watching television instead. But I have a couple of books on the shelf that I want to read, so as soon as I get through the two issues of Rolling Stone I haven’t read yet I’ll start in on Toby Litt’s Corpsing. I thought Beatniks was pretty funny and I’m told Corpsing is even better. Although I don’t read enough I’m great at buying books, so I have several books that I haven’t even opened yet, which is a bit like having homework lying around you haven’t started working on (you know, guilt wise). But it’s great when you have to take a train somewhere and you can just pull something out of the shelf and not have to buy some Grisham crap at the station.

To continue the ongoing saga, that is the decoration of my apartment, I'll just mention that I finally got the plastic poster things that I needed, so now I’ve decorated my kitchen with an I Shot Andy Warhol poster and my bedroom with a Warhol Playboy poster and a poster of Andy and Edie standing on a stepladder in front of the Empire State Building (can you sense a theme here?). I also hung a couple of photos over my desk taken by my friend Joey and a Magritte postcard underneath the Lichtenstein one, which was already hanging on one of the walls. But even with all the pictures and posters I still think the walls are way too bare and white, but I’m not really sure what to do about it.

The weirdest thing I’ve seen today is an article in The Post claiming that Triumph the Insult Comic Dog has recorded an album called Songs in the Key of Poop. I’m sure it’ll be an excellent record… for me to poop on!

When I was 14-15 years old I played in a band with four guys I went to school with. We played mainly cover songs and played at a lot of youth festivals for a couple of years until our drummer quit to… okay, so I don’t exactly remember, but he definitely left and even though we kept on playing with our guitar player’s younger brother for a while it wasn’t really the same. We put a lot of time into it and even got to the stage where we wanted to write our own stuff and record demos. Thankfully, we only recorded one song and nobody knows where that tape is now, so I very much doubt that anyone will ever hear it again.

The point of the story is that I got a phone call two days ago from a guy I used to hang out with back then and he told me that one of the guys from my old band is getting married. Actually, he’s marrying his high school sweetheart and he proposed to her just a few months shy of their ten year anniversary. Now even though this guy was one of my best friends for many years I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in years. He moved away to go to school at some point, but we had drifted apart long before that for no real reason other than sometimes friends just stop hanging out. So I’m not in any way surprised that I’m not invited to the wedding, but I was very surprised when I got the call informing me about the wedding and also received an invitation to the bachelor party (it’s a surprise party by the way, so don’t tell anyone). I have really mixed feelings about attending mainly because the rest of the people there will be people I knew and/or were friends with ages ago and most of them I haven't seen in almost ten years. But at the same time the groom-to-be is a really old friend of mine, so not going would also be pretty strange. I’m not sure what will happen at the bachelor party, but I know for damn sure this won’t be one of the events like Jason Bonham’s wedding, where we get the old band back together, so at least that’s a comfort.

I have a friend who owns a lot of board games, so tonight he tried to teach me to play El Grande. I got the basic rules, but with strategy games like this you need to play a few times to figure out how to best use the cards you're dealt and to know when to attack and when to chill. In many ways Kenny Rogers was right when he said that you have to know when to hold 'em, but also when to fold 'em. In that song lies in many ways a universal lesson, which can be helpful in a variety of situations. So after the first game I choose to fold 'em and we went down to the closest thing I have to a neighbourhood café to play backgammon instead. But luck had decided to not be a lady tonight, so I went through a series of humiliating defeats and finally just decided to call it quits and go home.

I had actually planned on writing about a surprising phone call I received last night, but it's getting late, so I'll save that one for tomorrow. But until then you can check out this weird story about the arrest of Nick Nolte. In this picture he looks like he could be the next Unabomber. But since he was obviously framed I'm sure the Malibu police will give him 48 Hours to team up with Eddie Murphy to sort out this all out.

Since today is a special day I’ll share three pictures that I took a year ago today in NYC:

I’m finding it increasingly hard to say anything about the attacks and especially the way the media has depicted the consequences (both the personal and political ones) without sounding like an arrogant, thoughtless, and coldhearted shithead. So, not unlike that rabbit from Bambi, in this case I’ll choose to shut up, when I have nothing nice to say. However, I do think that it would be nice if we from tomorrow could get on with our lives and try to think and talk about something else.

Last night I went down the pub and saw Arsenal beat Manchester City 2-1. Two things struck me about the game: Firstly, I’d say that if that last goal by Thierry Henry hadn’t been called for offside (which it wasn’t) it would have been the best goal scored this year and secondly, I think Peter Schmeichel is too fat and slow to play for a Premier League squad. It was almost embarrassing as he waddled up to the Arsenal goal for the last corner kick and hadn’t the ball gone out scoring another goal on him would have been like taking candy from a child.

I’m listening to the new Flaming Lips album today and there are some stunning songs on it. I think Wayne Coyne has an absolutely beautiful voice, which has a bit of fragility to it, which fits their dreamy music perfectly. I’ve only seen them live once, but because it was the day after nine people died at the Pearl Jam show at Roskilde 2000 it was a pretty special show (I did see their car extravaganza at Roskilde the year before, but that doesn’t count). Their show was probably a bit more subdued than normal, but it was an amazingly beautiful experience that I'm glad I saw although a lot of people questioned watching concerts the day after nine people had died at one.

I feel terrible today. I woke up around 6am and knew that I felt sick, but at the same time I was still in a dream-like state, which was very strange. When I woke up properly after a while my stomach was cramping up and I just felt horrible. So the next couple of hours was either spent talking into the big, white phone or sipping water from a glass, so I wouldn't completely dehydrate. It felt like it was food poisoning, but I've had that once and that was a lot worse, so I guess I just overdid it with the snacks last night. But when I finally felt like I was empty inside I went back to bed and almost passed out and slept for about four hours.

I've been up for two hours now and although I have eaten and had a cup of coffee my throat is killing me and I'm tired and unable to concentrate. I tried writing a couple of emails and reading an article, but I just end up staring with blank eyes at the screen. I'm feeling restless, bored, tired, annoyed, and not well at all. So in order to get a little energy back I might go outside for a bit and wander around. I could definitely eat some ice cream right now, so I might go get a sundae or something.

As planned I watched both football games last night (and during breaks I saw Pete Sampras win the US Open), so for me that was a pretty cool night. I was very surprised by how lackluster the Rams' offense looked, but hopefully they'll get back on track in a hurry (Kurt Warner is the starting QB for my Fantasy team), and although the Ravens lost their first game (and according to Mike Preston they'll lose the next four as well) it was nice to hear that Jamal Lewis had run well and that new QB Chris Redman had played well and even made a touch down. And it was nice to see that all the hype surrounding Falcons' QB Michael Vick had a lot of truth to it. The guy played a hell of a game last night against the Packers.

The last couple of days I've been listening to the new Coldplay record and it's really good. I've seen them live twice and I think their first album is very good, but I wasn't too excited about hearing their new album. I didn't like the single at first and there's just something strangely unexciting about them. I mean they're just a bunch of quiet lads, who make nice songs and do polite interviews. But I think Chris Martin is really growing into the frontman role (he did a nice Bono impersonatian at Midtfyns) and the new record is more versatile than the last one. So after listening to it over and over the last couple of days I've been getting pretty excited about the record and especially about seeing them in November.

The highlight of an uneventful weekend will be the first Sunday of NFL football on Danish television. And to mark the beginning to the season Zulu will be showing first the Packers/Falcons game and then the Broncos/Rams game, which both look like they could be action packed and high on scoring. It would have been nice to see the first Ravens game to get an idea as to how bad of a state the team is in, but obviously the Ravens/Panthers game isn't of interest to a lot of people over here. But I'm totally psyched about the season starting all the same, so I have got my Fantasy team ready and in about an hour I'll make a snack run to get Pringles, Coke, pizza, and whatever else I can carry out of the local cornershop, so I'm ready for six hours plus of football mayhem.

I haven't really done much this weekend except being hungover and depressed that the Danish soccer team only got 2-2 against Norway. But I did get to watch The Muse, which I hadn't seen before and Happiness, which I had seen before. The Muse was a fun, relaxing comedy about a screen writer, who loses his edge and by way of a friend gets in touch with a real honest-to-God muse (played by Sharon Stone). It had several fun cameos and did a lot of inside jokes on Hollywood, so it was fairly entertaining.

Happiness, however, is still the most disturbing movie in the world. It's a very funny movie, but at times it's almost nauseating, so you sometimes feel like turning it off, but you still keep on watching. It's brilliantly cast and it takes the portrait of American suburbia a lot further than American Beauty. If you haven't seen it and you're not squeemish it's definitely worth checking out.

Watched Zoolander last night and it was very funny. The DVD is packed with outtakes and deleted scenes (is there a difference?) and other stuff, which is almost as funny as the actual movie (Will Ferrell is actually a lot funnier in the outtakes than in the movie). However, the highlight was the two original VH-1 bits that Ben Stiller did in 1996 and 1997, which I hadn't seen before. I think both Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson are great, but found it slightly annoying that Jerry Stiller doesn't seem to be able to act in any other way than he did in Seinfeld and does on King of Queens.

I'm having work problems today as it seems someone deleted my email account and the mails I was supposed to be receiving this week have been bouncing. At first I thought it was a general problem, because I couldn't access our database, either. But after a couple of days I contacted our office and it turns out my account had been erased for some reason. So now I'm way behind with work and I've had to contact a lot of people to find out if they've been emailing me like crazy the last couple of days.

There's a lot going on tonight. I'm meeting up with a lot of different people a lot of different places and hopefully we'll all eventually end up at the Love Shop concert. I'm trying to coordinate everyone's plans, but right now it's a bit of a mess. So we'll just have to see what happens.

I was looking for something fun to read and stumbled on a review of the first episode of ALF over at X-Entertainment. However, halfway through I had to do a little research to verify a story and as it turns out the story checks out. Creepy stuff!

Btw. did you know Alex Doonesbury was a blogger?

What the hell is going on over at Daypop today? I tried to make a screen dump, but I couldn't make the links readable, when I minimized the screen dump, so hopefully it'll still look weird, when you go there.

Today, I'll try to do some reading and listen to some of the CDs I've gotten lately. Later, I'll go see if Zoolander is available at the video store and then watch my friend Morten (the one on the right) talk about having a famous girlfriend on national television. And later I'll probably have to email him and ask why on earth he'd go on a talk show like that?

My parents and siblings were here most of Sunday and they came bearing food and gifts. It was a nice day, but I was really tired, so I just sat around most of the day trying to make conversation and not let me Mum drive me nuts (for some reason she'd pulled out the drawer underneath my stove and apparently it was disgusting down there. I tried to tell her that I didn't even know that the drawer was filthy, because I never opened the damn thing, but she insisted on commenting on it a hundred times). But other than that it was cool. My sister hung out afterwards and we saw the last bits of different movies that had all started earlier on and then that was it.

Monday I went down to an exhibit of local artist Jesper Seneca's work and I actually quite liked it. Some of Seneca's paintings reminded me of Rauschenberg, who I like. At the exhibit local act Country Stig perform a bunch of his own songs, which was cool. His best song was inspired by Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night delivered in a Johnny Cash-like style, which worked out pretty well.

I also picked up the Swingers DVD yesterday. I've seen the movie at least ten times (it was actually one of the movies I saw half off with my sister the other day), but I found it for next to nothing, so I had to buy it. Ron Livingston is amazing in this movie. Once you stop laughing at the references to Snoop Dogg, NKOTB, House of Pain, Disney, and Wayne Gretzky, and get sick of hearing about how the beautiful babies are sooo money then you'll notice what a great performance Ron delivers.

I saw the second episode of Contest Searchlight today and it was very funny. It's sort of a parody of Project Greenlight, but instead of creating a movie the winner gets to create a sitcom. Since the show is packed with references to Greenlight and showbiz it probably won't ever air here (I don't think anyone here knows who Colin Quinn is), so I'll probably try to get the rest of the episodes through the miracle of filesharing.

My friend Søren stopped by with my CDs and the videos he'd promised me and there is some amazing stuff on those tapes. I saw five minutes of a Dinner For Five episode with Sarah Silverman, Kevin Pollak, Ron Livingston, and Rod Steiger and if you're a movie/television/stand-up buff like me this is heaven. I saw Robert Schimmel: Unprotected this morning and most of it was absolutely hysterical. It's very sex oriented, but from a marriage perspective, which is cool. So whatever free time I have over the next weeks will probably be spent watching all these shows. And when I'm not watching the videos I'll be listening to the CDs he brought me. I've been listening to We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes by Death Cab for Cutie almost none stop, since I got it. It's just that good a record.

But speaking of comedy Doc Searls had a fun entry about why Bill Maher should have a weblog. He mentions Dennis Miller in the same breath and normally I'd agree with him, but after I heard Miller's Let's kill everyone rant on Leno a couple of months ago I'm not sure I would want to read his blog. I thought Miller was a pretty smart guy, but he made Chuck Heston sound like the Dalai Lama and I think there are enough bloggers like that already.

I went out last night to see Superheroes (again) and as always the crowd went nuts and sang along with every song. I mention Superheroes here all the time, but most of you have probably never heard of them, so here's your chance. I've found links to the video for Turn Me On and a bunch of their older stuff as well. so you can get an idea of what all the fuss is about. After the concert I went to the after-party for the movie reception that unfortunately I didn't attend. I met a couple of friends I haven't seen in ages and had a few drinks and heard some tunes. It was all good.

Oh, I'm twenty-friggin'-eight today. What's up with that?