Simon Langley 2.0

Here you go! It’s called Fascination by Alphabeat

Here is the scenario:
You are shipwrecked on a desert island, there is plenty of water but there are no animals living there that are large enough to eat. You are allowed an unlimited supply of one particular tin of food, the dilemma is which tin do you choose?

By the way the baked beans would be a stupid choice, I have only used the picture as an example…

This sort of thing does not happen very often, once a decade perhaps.

Very few events warrant a place on my blog but I think this one certainly does.

Michael Jackson is the biggest pop star the world has ever known and is probably one of the most famous people to have ever lived.

Championship Manager was my favourite game back in the day and here are some top tips for anyone wishing to play it now (you can download it here).

• Use 1-4-5 formation, sounds crazy but it works, try it
• Paul Warhurst can play defence, midfield or attack right, left or centre - versatile or what!
• Jason Kaminsky (Nottingahm Forest), if you put him in the team and play him for a couple of seasons has the potential to be awesome
• Noel Whelan and Jamie Forrester work very well together
• Colin Cooper always ends up playing for England…

One of my favourite websites is the Waybackmachine - an Internet archive of websites dating back to 1996. It really is amazing how much some sites have changed. Here are some very good examples…

The BBC website in 1997

It seemed to be the fashion to use black backgrounds in 1997!

 The Coca Cola website in 1996

I have no idea what this is about…

 The McDonalds website in 1996

Ditto

 The Pepsi website in 1996

Prepare for an epileptic fit looking at this background, it is mental.

I think the following article about a mummified cat found in the wall of a Devon house is very interesting. If was the owner of the house I would leave the cat where it is.

I wonder why people thought cats could fend off evil spirits, weird!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/8011361.stm

Some of my personal favourites

Bill Stickers Will Be Prosecuted - Bill Stickers is innocent!

Jesus wepped
At the advertising agency which lost the Schwepps account

I thought clap was a form of applause until I discovered Smirnoff

The grave of Karl Marx is just another communist plot
Charing Cross Road

God is dead - Nietszche
Nietszche is dead - God
Friedrich Nietzsche was a nineteenth-century German philosopher who wrote critical texts on morality and religion

Don’t let them cut hire education
Camberwell School, 1977

One would think to read all this wit,
That Shakespeare came here to shit

An excellent quaffer called Rafferty,
Went into a gentlemen’s lafferty,
The walls caught his sight,
Quoth he: ‘Newton was right,
I am now the centre of Grafferty!’

A road sign in Lincolnshire:
TO MAVIS ENDERBY AND OLD BOLINGBROKE
To which someone added:
The gift of a son

Kentucky Freud Chicken - Mother-fucking good
Camden

On a Norfolk village poster advertising a talk on ‘What to do if you are going bald’
Someone has added:
Prepare to meet thy dome

Download Microsoft Photo Editor here

Now I am not a fan of Microsoft at all, however Microsoft Photo Editor has one really useful function that I have yet to find in another program.

Basically it allows you to select a colour (or colours within a set tolerance) to be made transparent within an image. This is really useful and a really quick way of getting rid of a solid background colour. Of course this is not very useful when you have a background colour that is of varied colours - but never the less useful all the same.

To do this, select the transparent colour picker:

Select the tolerance:

And what do you know, the area you selected (or at least the area you selected within the tolerance) is now transparent.

Can this be done in Photoshop? If so I’d love to know how!!

A very random, but very useful tip I read today. If you want to know whether an egg has gone off (or not), drop it in a cup of water, if it floats it is off. This is because as an egg goes off, gas is produced thus making it more buoyant.

A tip to save money in the credit crunch!

It took me a while to find this re-mixed version of the Don Thomas classic, so here you are, great song!

When I was younger my parents used to take me on walks in Winthorpe just outside of Newark. One rather unusual feature of these walks was a large, disused (not 100% sure what you could use it for) concrete barge on the bank of a lake next to the river Trent. No one that I have asked knows why this barge is there or what is was used for. The vessel is huge (probably 20m+) and I would love to know a bit more about it anyone got any ideas?! Here is a picture courtesy of those dastardly people at Google…

And here are some more pictures, taken on location no less:

And what always goes hand in hand with a concrete barge? A concrete toilet cubicle of course…

Back in the day when I used to like WWF wrestling, The British Bulldog was (of course) my favourite as he was the only British wrestler around at the time.

It turns out that Davey Boy Smith (aka The British Bulldog) used to compete with his cousin The Dynamite Kid in a tag-team call The British Bulldogs:

Apparently the Dynamite Kid was (according to Bret Hart) the best pound for pound wrestler ever. One of his signature moves, the ‘diving headbutt’ has permanently injured his spine and has confined him to a wheelchair. Davey Boy Smith died of a heart attack in 2002, probably brought on by the use of anabolic steroids.

Whilst I am not denying wrestling is fake, some of the moves Davey Boy Smith carries out are quite incredible. In particular 1:00, 1:28 and 3:14 in the above are most impressive.

Wrestling is a very strange, yet very interesting sport. Due to drug use, many wrestlers die young. Wrestlers that I used to watch that have since died include: British Bulldog (heart attack), Kurt Hennig AKA Mr Perfect (cocaine overdose), Big Boss Man (heart attack), Yokozuna (heart attack), Owen Hart (stunt gone wrong), Ravishing Rick Rude (heart attack), Earthquake (bowel cancer) and Andre the Giant (Heart Attack).

The Hart family have written various books on the various controversies of wrestling which I think I shall pursue.

Wherever you are on the underground you are bound to see ‘Tox’ spraypainted everywhere. I first noticed Tox years ago in Leicester (I think) and I have always thought that he is not much an artist, he just seems to get his name everywhere. I found this video on YouTube about the whole situation, very interesting - particularly about Tox being able to gain access to some crazy places:

If this guy was an artist then fair enough, but as far as I am concerned he is just someone who has put his name across the whole of the UK. If his bigger stuff (see below) was more artistic then I would have more time for him.

This is found in Nottingham and in my opinion is of far greater artistic merit, but how long it took is anyone’s guess…

A couple of people have left comments (below) about my blog post (thanks guys) and would just like to say a couple of things:

- Tox is not very good at art;
- The guy gets my respect for getting into to crazy places and getting his name everywhere rather than for his rubbish throw ups.

The thing I don’t really understand is that the Tox tag looks very much like he could do good work, perhaps (as suggested in the comment below) he is simply doing something quick? If Tox could do what this guy below does (artistically I mean) and get the volume he currently does, I would write kinder things!