I have the urge to blog, which is pretty rare these days, so I better give in to it while it lasts. I don't have anything particularly deep or interesting to talk about in mind.

I went to a gig on Friday with JS. As far as I can remember (and blogs are good for helping with that), I haven't been gigging* since a disastrous and abortive Scissor Sisters gig in 2004. That time, a packed and pushy crowd triggered a severe attack of claustrophobia that had me literally dashing for the exit halfway through the show.

This time was completely different! A much more intimate venue (and a convenient location at the edge of the crowd) meant I didn't feel boxed in. It also helped that The Go! Team were absolutely amazing live. Usually I liken a live act to watching Michaelangelo attempt to re-paint the Mona Lisa in half an hour: sure, he'll produce a great painting, but nothing like as good as the original that he spent painstaking months crafting. But with the Go! Team, the difference between the record and the live act is the difference between watching a game on TV and actually being in the game. They got the crowd completely involved, and everyone was jumping and hand-waving and shouting on cue. It was massive fun, and as a result I might give this whole gigging thing a second shot, while controlling for size of venue.

What else? Well, the story of monkeys leading a deputy mayor of Delhi to fall to his death, despite its tragic nature, has been making me laugh, mainly because one of the attempted solutions to a city overrun with monkeys has been "the training of larger, more ferocious monkeys" to attack the first lot. If that's not the human solution to everything summed up, I don't know what is.

Yep, so, uh, gigs and monkeys. That's what I got.

*except for live acts at Popstarz, which just sort of happened to be there while I would have been there anyway, so don't really count as intentional gigging.