Yesterday, I was in Brent Cross (shopping centre), seeking out bloke-stylee car magazines for a job I'm doing, and I was drawn to Wallis - my favourite shop. So there I was, hungrily devouring the textures and colours, when I happened across a fabulous pair of black, slightly stretchy, hipster velvet jeans. With - black, of course - embroidery round the bottom of the legs. And I'm thinking to myself "these are sooo me. I have to have them." As I pick up two pairs (one the size I am and one the size I'd like to be, just to see what happens), to try them on, I realise something. I am already wearing these jeans. Least I'm consistent, though.

Jam Master Jay from Run DMC was shot this afternoon in New York. I was a big fan, in my college years. Showing my age, I know, but remember Walk This Way?

I was just about to call someone, a friend, that I already talked to this morning - it's my Jewish telephone gene, I can't help myself - when the bit from Toby Young's book, How to Lose Friends And Alienate People, came into my mind. It's where one of the Voguettes - fashionista women who work on Vogue - says that someone who calls anyone more than once a day is a stalker. The power of the media, eh?

Geek Help?
So my PC's crashed about eight times today, outlook won't load anymore, and crashes my machine. When it does - randomly - load, none of the emails I've sent all day seem to have arrived. Resorted to hotmail, but battling spam-fatigue. Times like this, wish I had an IT department.

It was my random yiddish-word-of-the-day back in July, and now it's today's word in my all-purpose Yiddish calendar. I bring you ... (drum roll) zaftig.

Just to keep Azeem happy.... template-update time. I finished the last book weeks ago, but blogger was slightly tempermental at the time. Anyway, I'm still reading Zadie: it's slow going. Not least because she uses the tetragrammaton - four letter holy name for God - as a design device to separate paragraphs, and it disturbs me.

Speaking of my bus shelter, which, y'know, we, weren't, it's interesting that they've managed to change the advertising twice, but haven't actually errected a bus stop. And public sector workers want more pay, but then so do I.

So, like, what exactly is a step-change? How is it different from regular change?

I seem to have a recent - possibly Russian? - influx of people wanting to know how to pronounce Maida Vale. It's may-duh vale, with the stress on the first syllable. Of course, if you're Russian, that English-stylee transliteration may not help you, but still. Don't say I never do anything for you.

Escher-esque Experience
One day last week, I had a meeting in the City, and early afternoonish, was getting a train from Cricklewood BR to Blackfriars. I know, I live on the edge. So I'm standing on the platform, and I see an older guy, in quite a distinctive flat cap, who looks remarkably like Z's dad. But I'm not sure. I don't want to go up to him and say hi and find out he's a random older man and feel a fool. So I call Z at work, and say "I'm at Cricklewood Thameslink, and there's a guy who looks kinda like your dad... do you think it's him?" We discuss it for a while, and then my train comes.

Saw Z last night, and she told me that her dad said to her, "Saw your friend Sasha at Cricklewood station, but I didn't go and talk to her because she looked busy. She was on the phone."

I wonder what I would have done before mobile phones?

You've heard of method acting. Now, I bring you method shoplifting: she did it for a role, honest, m'lud.

Was looking up a reference late last night for An Officer And A Gentleman - don't even ask - and came across this: Searching for Debra Winger. Which is apparently a Rosanna Arquette documentary about "various actresses talking about the pressures they face as women working in the entertainment industry". But there's a spate of these where-are-they-now titles: Looking for Andrew McArthy, Tom Dick and Debbie Harry. OK, they're not all that many, but there's a definite obsession to harking back to the eighties like it was cool, and it was my childhood, so it can't have been.

Mornin'.
Anyone remember the name of that site which is kinda like a mapping resource - you put in a name/blog, and then it draws lines of all the interconnections? And you can change the emphasis, by clicking on one of the links, and they all reformatted to be related to that.... I may have blogged it once, but sadly, without a decent keyword. Slapped hands.

And another thing; while storms raged across the UK on Saturday night/Sunday morning, and a lampost up my street blew over, as well as my neighbours For Sale sign snapping in half and ending up four houses down, one thing didn't happen. My fucking bus shelter emerged from the incelement weather remarkably unscathed, although it still doesn't have a bus stop, so is practically - as in, "in a practical sense" rather than nearly - useless.

Though there was a rather cute news story tonight about Al Fayed at Harrods trying to stop Transport for London from making a bus lane outside his store. If they don't listen to me, Mohammed, why would they listen to you? Even if you are on the news wrapping up sweetie treats for Ken.

Other storm related stuff: for some reason I found it terribly, terribly distressing on Sunday morning seeing trees with huge branches broken off, and in one case in the back of Maida Vale, a 200 foot tree snapped in two. It feels like watching a person with their limbs broken off. I know what you're thinking - treehugger. But I'm not, honestly, it's just the sense of something with such longevity being destroyed so quickly. Though obviously there are much more distressing things happening in the world, like the Russian government gassing a large chunk of their theatre going public. Now that can't have been one of their election promises.

I'm such a terrible photographer, that I have no pictorial evidence of Saturday, but luckily Stuart does. And he also tells a mean story:

"With the prior dinner engagement it wasn't possible for me to wear the planned Mickey Mouse costume (yeah, right), so I had settled on a black suit with a white shirt. I thought that this would be reasonable for dinner and then if anyone made an issue of it at the party I would say I was James Bond, or a Reservoir Dog, or indeed any one of tens of black and white film stars.

My pretension was utterly deflated by the innocent, guile-less comment of one of the hostess' friends: "So... are you in costume, or do you always dress like that?" "

So yeah, I had a party. Kinda for my birthday, and kinda because I like to have a party the weekend the clocks change, because you get an extra hour. I was slightly worried that it might turn into a really bad Greek tragedy: you know, in the final scene where everyone comes on stage and ties up all the sub-plots? I had images of barbelites checking out my synagogue attendance with my local community buddies and my weblogger friends wondering who the artsy-musicky people were, who in turn were surprised by the whole Limmud crowd, but it all seemed pretty cool. Although a little like a UK election turnout: about 59% of the people dressed up in some way, many of them very coolly (it was a favourite-fictional-character theme) extremely realistic Nigella, Obewan Knobe, Tigger, bunch of comics characters too cool for me to recognise. My fancy dress? I'm already a fictional character, darling. My neighbour, Jair DJed, with Williams C, and you can see them the firstTuesday of the month at the Notting Hill Arts Club.

And the punch was perfectly girly and lethal - you would expect no less from me - and if you want the recipe, here it is:
One bottle of vodka
Half a bottle of archers
1 or 2 litres of orange juice, depending on your desired lethal potency quotient
Chopped up apples and oranges
That's it: it takes like two and half minutes to make...

And about a day and half to recover from. Or that could just be my age.

Kinda, sorta, via Brooke - she was looking for a word that turned out to be klafta and sent me the link - a powerful, real (feels real, anyhow) story about a woman who I guess is my Mum's age, growing up in the rag trade in what sounds like Hendon/Golders Green during the late fifties. I googled on Ruth Gershon. She's an historian, not even a writer. Powerful, powerful stuff.

Junkmail Geneology
Obviously one can never have too many offers of herbal viagra, penis enlargement, or any manner of pyramid-selling operations, but I wonder if junk-hotmailing has reached a new era.

Because now, I don't just get junkmail - bad enough, I know - I get culturally relevant junkmail. So time was, when you're junk mail came from fdfdyn56@hotmail.com or some such other memorable name, and you knew to delete it straight away. But now it comes from real people. Seemingly.

I've kept a note of junkmail receipts over the last three weeks, and they have included missives from the following "people". Might be my cultural heritage, but they really do sound like people I know...

Bradley Coleman - someone I was in Bnei Akiva - Jewish Youth Movement - with, who's now married to that nice girl from Edgware
Tallula Aperovitch - a friend of my Grandma's from the old country who thought her name sounded "too Jewish" so adopted a film-esque first name
Patience Cividino - a Nigerian friend of mine's mother - she's very involved in their church in Ealing
Zinnia Edaline - she's half named-after-someone's Grandma, half pen-name celebrity-status chaser. Get the name first, right?
Bevis Manica - named after half of a well-known synagogue, Bevis married into the Italian Manica leather handbag manufacturing family
Yamin Syshe - really sure this is a bloke I met on the beach in Tel Aviv who thought I was "veri boot-i-fool". Though when I left, he moved onto the next woman
Zavad Yoninva - Yamin's best friend; they do the good-guy/better-guy routine on the beach with the tourists
Lanora Nazar - This might be that nice woman I sat next to on a bus between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem who shared her lunch with me. Of course, that was when people still got buses

So: this could be another Jewish-conspiracy type thing with hotmail. Or maybe a world-domination plan that doesn't involve any kind of extremists apart from tech-types. My question is: what a great job? OK, that's a statement. But can you imagine being at a party, and when people say "what do you do?" you say, "oh, I'm a Creative Director of Name Management at We'llJunkYouToDeath.com. What do you do?"

What you do is, trash your hotmail account. Life's too short. As - obviously - are my sentences. Sorry about that, I'm told I should be more discursive ocassionally, but I never get round to it. There; that's not bad, is it?

Lots to say, lots to do: sorry I've been out of action. Fun-packed weekend, which I'll talk about later, but in the meantime, must get my carpet steam-cleaned.

Oh, and it's my birthday today. 21 again, and all that...

When I saw this yesterday, I figured it was one of those geek in-jokes that someone had done for a dare. Turns out it's true.

Then again, it could be some mass transport joke I don't get. Not getting jokes is my specialist subject today.

In a bizarre yet fascining exchange this morning with an expert on leasehold reform - I am still stressed about my managing agent - I learned that there are only seven different fundamental wallpaper patterns, and five frieze patterns. And he's really not a mathematician, honest. Amazing what you learn.