Okay, today is a day of Metal. I have decided, fate says it should be so, and god damn I not only miss my Sinatra collection but a good bit of Pantera-style `fuck yeah!` heaviness.

I sat down at the computer today, and after a few minutes the speakers shared by both PCs in the hotel lobbby here sparked into life with the tones of a really heavy death metal band - the guy on the other computer looked a likely, if surprised-at-the-sudden-appearance-of-metal candidate, so I asked him if he had made that happen - and he had: it was his band on MySpace and the page was loading erratically (surprise surprise), and he was, once again, a German I have met travelling who was really quite cool.

His MySpace page with his band's stuff is here - it is really quite hardcore or heavy though, you have been warned: www.myspace.com/deafaid

I have a fantastic opinion of the Germans as a people as result of travelling, apart from a pair of stoners in Hampi - who were totally nice guys but were just a bit young I think, maybe, and tried a bit too hard at everything - every German person I've met, from those guys of about 18 in Hampi, to Stefan who managed to save me amputating my own thumb in the jungle, to the 75-year old Naval captain I talked with for a long time in Margao, and all others inbetween, have been the best travellers to hang out with, and the coolest people, along with the other Brits.

And folks like Greg (the goddamned yankee) of course who I am meeting up with again soon, and will hopefully remain in touch with and good friends with for the rest of my modest life, and Maria who of course deserves some kind of honourable mention here too. Probably. Maybe. Well she's alright, you know? She's okay ;)

So there you go. I've forgotten The War and so should you ;)

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I also checked my emails not half an hour ago, and there was a message from my very good friend Dude (A.K.A Ben, if the page don't load then his profile is private: basically his surname is Jude so he has gone by the former moniker for about the last decade. Dude is one of those good solid people, never one to let the light of proper metal music fade :D ) to join a Facebook group called Rock Vs Rap - right here:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5877894235

The group posting wall may have descended into total nonsense, but I just saw the title and thought "Fuck Yeah! Gimme some of that!" reflexively.

My long-haired, redneck, gun-loving, hard-drinking, Pantera-worshipping past is not lost, and that makes me so very glad :)

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In honour of this, I challenge and request that anyone reading who doesn't think that they like rock or metal, and has never heard a Metallica or Pantera song, for example, to hunt one down and listen with unbiased ears.

Metallica are the most accessible metal band out there, I guess, and they have released somewhere around a three hundred or more songs since forming in 1983 or something, but please, in honour of the whole genre, my indulgence, your willingness to try something new, and a whole generation of people who like their music guitar-based, heavy and hard, relinquish any misgivings you might have about Hard Rock or Heavy Metal and just go have a listen to something :)

If you want to hear music for free without leaving the computer - and this applies to anything and everything of any genre by the way - you can `stream`, as we say, music from all over the WWW using this site, without paying, without having to do anything more than search for the band, artist, composer, song, writer or singer, and waiting to see what comes up:

http://www.b3ta.cr3ation.co.uk/site/music-plus/

Search for `Metallica` and you'll get a mixed bag - if you get the result, or if you search for it, I recommend in particular a song called `One` (just search for "Metallica one" without the quote marks) and another called Master of Puppets (search for, you guessed it, "Metallica master of puppets").
To play any song simply click it once, make sure your speakers are on obviously, and adjust the volume to your level of heavy metal resistance :D

The optimum volume in these matters is, always, the very loudest setting possible with the best of whatever equipment you have access to :D

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Also, if you want a quieter life, they have many more melodic songs such as `Nothing Else Matters`, and `Unforgiven`.

If you want something heavier after that then search for `Killswitch Engage` or `Slayer` or `Slipknot` or `Entombed` or `Gorgoroth` or something else you can find by looking for "heavy metal bands" on Google, but I'm guessing by the names of those guys that you might be a little turned off from the harder stuff, if metal isn't already your thing ;)

If you want to hear some of the most melodic, dramatic, emotive and excellent music ever played on electric guitar then I strongly recommend you have a little search on the cr3ation site there for a band called `Faith No More` who are not very loud or `heavy`, as we say, for the most part, but are something incredible when it comes to soaring melodies and excellent tunes :D

There, that's the last outrageous thing I'm gonna ask you today - normal faux-eloquent service shall now resume. By the way, this thought for the day particularly applies to you, oh Mother and Father, for I know you are reading :D Go have a listen to what turned your son into the evil genius he wishes he could be, ahahahahaha!! *ahem*

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As you can probably tell I'm a lot less serious and a lot more silly today - I am feeling good. I spent the night with two girls in my bed and I've found a solution to the photograph problem, so life is pretty sweet :D I may have to hunt down and kill every last smiley ever born for use on this page today :D you have been warned ;)

The photos, finally, although I will still have to slog through the posting process, are under control. One of the PCs in the hotel here can actually accept a little Java application I downloaded for Photobucket - Long Story Short, I can upload ALL the pictures from my memory cards onto the inetrnet, and they are now safe. Phew.

There are three copies of some of them and only one of others, in various places throughout two thousand-picture-each albums so I still have to plough through my entire accumulation of 'em in reverse order to make sure post the rights ones i.e. almost all of them, but I can now do that from anywhere, even after leaving the sanctuary of this glorious hotel (and India is going to be hard on me when I do, it's been so lovely getting all this done) in a few days and probably just getting a train straight to Chennai (Madras) and getting a plane to Thailand.

4 and a half months in this country may have been enough - and my friend Chris keep whining at me; "haven't you gone to another coouuunnnttrrriiiiiieeeeeeeeee yeeeeeeettt??"; so I feel like at least one other person is rooting for me to leave.

This really is turning into a post for my old friends rather than the guys on blog.co.uk isn't? Well fair's fair - I only hope one or two of them actually read it today :)

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The girls in the bed - well, it wasn't as exciting as all that. In fact in many ways it was the very opposite of exciting, for the reason they were in my room was one of charity (no not like that, I'm sure they're very attractive young ladies for their respective partners ;) ) and football. Hardly a promising night, is it?

Even though I do enjoy watching a good game I wouldn't usually go out of my way to see anything less than an England game somewhere past the qualifying stage (except maybe unless it bizarrely turned out we might not qualify for something, hmmm?), so quite why I made myself stay up until 4am this morning for football that never actually materialised, I can only explain with the following three facts:

Fact 1: These two girls I met last night, Jody and Lucy, were really sound lasses and I enjoyed chatting with them. There is another English guy in our hotel too and the four of us were the last to leave the lobby last night, spending an hour or two chatting and relaxing and conspiring to make the poor guy behind the counter to go to the whole other end of the building and makes us tea; how very British of us :D ; and trying to make the Pizza Hut deliver way past the allotted hour of closing.

Also they were football crazy and needed my assistance to actually watch the game (see below).
Jody was in fact quite properly football crazy, she knew more about Portsmouth Football Club's signings, seasons and history than anyone I know back home seemed to ever know about Southampton FC, the poor ailing Saints who seem unlikely to ever March Back In to anywhere except the local cemetary.

Excluded from this, maybe, is my 78-year-old mate Harry Manns, who's brother is the reason for Manns Estate Agency, and who I worked with for years and is the Fan's Fan when it comes to Southampton FC: his son is the prime-time DJ on The Saint, their radio station, and he has so much sway at the club that he often sits in the private boxes at the St. Mary's stadium for free chatting to the management over a pint or twenty.

He has free season ticket access to anywhere else he likes anyway (he'd have free drinks at the bar, too, but he could have easily drunk George Best under. I made the mistake of going head to head with Harry once at my first leaving do; I was re-employed by those guys three times, long story; I was fed water and led kindly to the taxi while Harry was still ordering more whisky and beer together. The man has the liver of a Camel.) and is a man of much affability, charm and pleasantness and who knows half the players from the last 40 years of Southampton FC's existence personally.

The great and the good at the Saints all know old Harry, and he gets an honourable mention himself here today because I emailed the old firm and they tell me he's laid up in bed with gout, the poor silly sod :P Still working at 78, too.

Fact 2: (it has been a long time since fact 1 hasn't it? I do get distracted) The girl's room, in which they were staying only a few hours until 5:30am when they were leaving to catch a train, was infested with cockroaches. I usually don't mind them too much and although I felt compelled to kill one or two recently - and been impressed and mildly terrified at their size - I generally would say they're not too bad: something you can put up with especially if you have a mosquito net.

After the rains last night though, maybe, they were a little bit nutty and were certainly numerous, gigantic, and energetic and flew into and around these poor girl's attemped accomodation with vigour and zip such as is not often seen outside of Biggin Hill airshow. They were fucking crazy for it - whatever `it` was - and some of them were the size of driveable vehicles.

The management take this sort of thing in their stride - the same way they do dead people in the road and toilets taken from the imagination of H.R.Geiger - but the girls, understandably, didn't want to sleep in a room where they were outnumbered about 14:1 by evil-minded flying beetles with those weird wavy antennae of theirs.

Have you seen a cockroach lately? The big ones look like they are perpetually trying to tune into some phantom radio station lost on a bandwave not cared-for since Marconi, the way they oscillate those sodding things, which is somehwat ironic as we shall see. And the antannae are always about as long as the fucking cockroach, giving them an unnerving reach even while static.

You can make your own jokes about Marconi and static there, but I wouldn't bother myself because it would only end in a pun.

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Item 3: (we're getting there!) The football had to watched on television, none of us having the luxury of omnioptometricity (read that one carefully ;) ), and there was no TV in my room - I didn't want one, wishing to actually see something of the place I was staying in; ha! - and the girl's room did (along with an over-generous distribution of insect life) contain a television set.

What I did, in a moment of nobility and decent-minded rectitude and having been asked would have felt like a right bastard if I had said no - was swap rooms with them, technically as was first verbally affirmed, although of course ended up just sharing the room because leaving me to the cockroaches would be bit bloody unfair. So, there's potential for a juicy tale here, eh?
No fucking chance. Not for that being on anyone's agenda anyway, but the source of my irritation was the sodding telly which wouldn't sodding well find any sodding channels despite us having a) the right leads b) there being an actual proper aerial socket in my room, despite the defecit of television, and even c) us knowing the time and channel the game was being shown ; ESPN, 1:45am to 3:30 incl. half time interval.

Everyone else seems to have a televison mind you, and I'm beginning to suspect there is a good reason for that...

I could not get anything tuned in - I found out how to tune stuff in, mind you, which was handy 'cause the TV's control display could very well have been in Hindi which would have been hilarious for about 0.2 seconds, but, despite working through the process for the full 90 minutes that the game was on, and the interval, chatting to Jody while Lucy had sensibly - with a touch of foresight not available to myself or Jody - crawled under the mosquito net and into bed, I could attain no reception beyond a few hazy channels of obviously Indian content, and a seriously half-arsed attempt at the Cartoon Network (which I probably would have been satisfied with by about 3 O'clock).

I guess there was a problem with the aerial socket; maybe that's why I'm the only one in the hotel without a telly, huh? Well I wasn't feeling too clever, I'd already hit my head once that day and banging it against the television in an attempt to make it let us see football wasn't going to happen, thankfully.

We still tried to tune the fucking thing in until the allotted hourn when the game was over, and Jody received a text from her boyfrined back home that the score was 4:2 in favour of Portsmouth. Pompey were through! Or so I thought.

It seems my statements about yesterday's football fixtures were not correct for Jody mumbled something about points and tables at this point that I couldn't understand and she possibly didn't enunciate correctly. It seems that the potential four candiates for the FA cup are Cardiff, Pompey, Birmingham and Barnsley, but who else could get it I have no idea - if SecBack ever reads this (and makes it this far down the page ;) ) then maybe he can explain it, coz I for one would love to know what the fuck I spent 3 hours trying to tune into if it wasn't an FA Cup semi final.

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We did have an amusing diversion before the game, between us runnning out of tea and us getting back to the hotel, apparently for me to run three floors like a burglar clutching a televison set and hoping none of the management were still up and about to see me; the girls and I (the other English bloke sensibly went to bed at midnight or so) bundling out of the hotel and along midnight streets, looking for a rickshaw and some food.

It was probably a pretty bloody stupid idea although we ended up finding a rickshaw guy who looked ancient and decrepit enough for either myself or either of the girls to take him out if he turned funny, but still not ideal to end up on the main MG road in Ernakulam getting late-night street snacks (omelettes and dosas, fried up right in front of us, bloody nice :) ) from a place surrounded by a dozen Indian men, some workers, some buyers of the mobile fryery.

If the girls had tried it on their own, well... you just don't do that sort of thing. So I went with them and, despite essentially being, from one point of view, the only that stands between ten or twelve potential attackers and two white girls in India at well gone midnight in a deserted street, I was reasonably happy.

Happier once we were in the rickshaw going back mind you, but happy - for the sake of all three of us of course, I hope you don't think I would for one second NOT be that barrier betweensuch attackers and two women - it's just that if dastardly deeds had been afoot then I have no illusions about surviving until morning.

India really isn't the place for this to happen; the people, despite being ever-ready to engage you in a little light swindling, are not the nasty type and are as peaceable a collection of humans as you'll find in any of the very nicest places. Still, I wouldn't feel entirely comfortable doing that anywhere on my own, let alone as a potential human shield, but still all was good and the guys at the stall were very friendly and polite, spoke enough English for them to sell us some stuff and only charged us about twice what they would an Indian, as it happens it was cheap as hell anyway because street food here is: 45 rupees for one dosa and 3 omelettes, and the omelettes were really rather good.

It's just that, maybe ideally, you do this sort of thing with 3 or 4 good-sized lads rather than two women and a guy with a paunch that prevents too much excessive exercise ;) Not an issue as it was, but still, I like to have the luxury of being prudent if actually possible.

Says the guy who ran in the rain and smashed his head on the floor yesterday ;)