The Fratellis - 25/10/2006
I went to see The Fratellis at Northumbria Student Union as part of the NME Rock n Roll tour on 25/10/2006. Other bands playing where The Maccubees, The Dykeenies and The Horrors. The Horrors seemed to consist of an indie band with some guy shouting down the microphone, didn’t really enjoy so went and chilled in the bar instead because the music was literally hurting my ears.
The Dykeenies appeared to be quite good as where The Maccubees but they are both rather indie bands and I am not a massive fan of indie music. I listen to bits of it but not lots, just people like Arctic Monkeys, Bloc Party and The Fratellis. Below are some photos of The Dykeenies and The Maccubees.
The Fratellies came on and put on a pretty good show. The start of their set was not very good but it seemed to improve from about a third of the way through until the end. One of the problems I didn’t like about the show was that the crowd get singing along to Chelsea Dagger and gave the impression this was the only Fratellis song they knew which kind of pissed me off a bit. Another thing which was a bit of a pain was that the band finished their encore with a cover of Goldfrapp’s Ooh LaLa which was good but surely they should of finished their show with one of their own songs?
Anyway below are some photos and a video of “For The Girl” by The Fratellis.
For The Girl - The Fratellis
Oh dear God what is going on?
I have not updated my blog for an entire 7 days. That’s right, a whole 7 days of not having some crap produced by me. To be fair nothing has really happened within this time so I shouldn’t really be bothering to update now but I don’t care.
I my now the proud owner of a copy of Big Java by Cay Horstmann, well I am until the 12th November when I have to return it to the library but I can live with this. 12th November is also my birthday which I share with Frayer and Kingy which means it is going to be an awesome party this year. Whooop
Well that’s kinda of the end of this update. If you feel like this is not meeting your blogging desire, I suggest you check out the on the toothpastefordinner website. Drew is pretty funny and his cartoons are good as well.
The “hidden costs” of University
You’re a student about to head off to University, possibly leaving your family for the first time and possibly going to a new location which you do not know very well and may not know anybody there. Now this is a daunting prospect watever you might think and you have costs to think about as well. Sure you could have a student loan but how far is that actually going to get you?
You may not be aware of this but to go to a decent University in the UK you have a mandatory fee of £3000 a year which you have to get a seperate loan to pay for and you have to pay back in the long run on top of your standard student loan to pay for accommodation and basic living. I will point out now that neither of these have to be payed back until you have graduated and are earning £15000 a year or over.
Standard student loan is something in the region of £1000 a term depending on the term length (usually works out at about £100 a week). Think you can live off that? Not a chance. I thought I could and I was being extra safe by keeping track of all my cash flow using a spreadsheet. This was until the book list hit me. I didn’t know this, don’t know if you do, but books are pretty expensive. I have been basically been given a list of books I need and 9 of them are recommended to buy and another 17 or so should be read for background reading.
Sure, books get them off ebay nice and cheap second hand. Again, not the case. I will take an example - Big Java (Second Edition) by Cay Hastmann. Selling from £30 to £50 depending on where you look. Admittedly it is a about 1200 pages long but then times that amount by 9 and you will see my problem.
This wouldn’t bother me so much if this wasn’t that these are books for just 1 semester, so I am going to have to fork out this amount of money twice (well, probably a bit less actually due to some courses ending and some starting and with some just continuing covering both semesters).
So as you can probably guess I won’t be buying many if any of these books unless it is an absolute necessity to try and save money.
Next point, anyone want to donate some money to the “Tom McKee is a poor student and would like lots of your money” fund? It’s a worthy cause, trust me.
UPDATE: I almost forgot. Another hidden cost of University life is the price you have to pay to joining the socities. I mean I am not too fussed to pay out a couple of quid for the Indie society or watever but £130 to join the boat club!!!!! You must be mad my friend.
Rowing update
Almost forgot. I have kind of quit rowing as of about an hour ago as they were wanting me to train everyday which is something I don’t really want to do especially during my freshers year at university and that the training takes up a few hours and means I have to travel between 30mins - to an hour on foot or by public transport. Normally wouldn’t be a problem except it is a 20 min walk to the Metro station where I then have to catch a Metro to the bus stop which takes me to the rowing centre so not really worth.
Probably just going to do running on the running machines or something boring like that from now on I guess but we shall see.
City of God
Thats right, it’s a friday night (well technically it’s saturday morning now as it is 00:25 by the computer clock) and I am in my room writing a web blog….how cool am I? No need to answer this question yet as we all know the answer to this. Anyway I am not out getting pissed because clubs, bars and pubs suddenly go up in price on a friday and saturday and surprisingly enough I cannot afford to go out drinking tonight; partly because I have been on 2 pub crawls on the past 2 days and spent something like £50 - £60 on alcohol (mainly on student offers as well).
Back to the point, just finished watching City of God (another lie, I actually finished it about an hour ago) and just felt like sharing how amazing it is. Yes I have seen it before but again I erge you all to go watch it but don’t buy it from W H Smiths as it costs £12.99 and I only bought it there as I had vouchers which I had to spend.
About a slum in Brazil called the City of God surprisingly enough and about a young kids growing up and how things changed in terms of the gangs during this time. It’s based on a true story so you have to weigh up how much of it is actually true but it’s still a good watch,
My finger, cheese and a knife
As you have guessed I have been experimenting with a sharp knife here at University. Probably not as bad as you think but I think I will write about it anyway partly because it is just a blog entry which is a bit different.
It was lunch time and felt a bit peckage so naturally decided to make myself a sandwitch. My sandwitch of choice was ham and cheese in seedy bread (it would of had lettuce, cucumber and tomato but I have no salad as I am a student) as it is a bit of a classic. I set off quite simply laying the bread out and placing the ham.
It now came to the cutting of the cheese. If you have ever cut cheese you would know it puts up a bit of resistants and so I just went for it and basically missed the cheese and sliced the end of my finger. I continued to bleed all over my sandwitch and the kitchen.
But don’t worry, it is healing quite well; there is a photo below.
This blog was poor, I apologise. I am tired and going on a pub crawl in half an hour so probably not at my most focused.
Hardcorelife
I don’t know who reads this blog and I do not particularly care (to a certain extent) but as you should be aware I have a site called thehardcorelife.com and basically I have added no new content to it for a while and I think that it needs this.
So basically anyone got any ideas? I wasn’t sure whether to attempt another snack pimp or to just put up some random videos which are quite funny (maybe change the Brown section to a general video section or something like that). I am also tempted to try and improve the layout of the site or something as it isn’t that amazing or to just try and get some more user interaction (by people actually using the forum!!!).
If this entry was boring, fear not a not so detailed entry about how my finger, cheese and a knife but I have a pub crawl tomorrow and another one on thursday so I have no idea when this will be written. You have probably already guessed the outcome of the little incident but you never know, it could be an interesting read.
