Busta Rhymes - Fire It Up
Yep, the Knightrider sample. Remember when this first came out? Hell yes.
22 plays
26.02.10
00:00:00 - Comments (View)
00:00:00 - Comments (View)
picture, reblog, london, family, university, memories, drunk post,
I’m going to assume that agirlcalledhenrietta took this photo of the inside of the Barbican complex, because it’s a fucking awesome shot. It reminds me of when I had my graduation ceremony there a few years back.
I spent 4 years at King’s College London to do my law degree, minus a year in Germany when I was 21, and it culminated in a ceremony at the Barbican with gowns and certificates.
My parents didn’t trust me to make it to the ceremony on time from my then abode, so booked me a hotel room neighbouring their own, for two nights.
I have to admit that my final year at uni was a slog; my friends had all graduated, and I couldn’t be bothered to make new friends. I just wanted the whole university/poor period of my life to be over and done with, and to get out into the real world.
For my parents, however, it was all about the ceremony, because I’m the eldest grandchild in the family. I still feel like a bit of an outcast because I couldn’t introduce them to X hundred friends.
For them, it was one of those moments of recognisation of the money that they’d put into my education, although maybe not quite the recognisation of how it had made me the man I am today.
It’s still one of those moments that will forever be engraved on my memory.
I just wish that I might’ve felt differently at the time, and maybe REALISED just how important it was to my parents, even if it meant fuck all to me.
Reblogged from: agirlcalledhenrietta
Originally posted on: a girl. her world.
I’d say that this is my favourite ever Arsenal goal. Not because of the quality of it, nor the technical skill involved in it, but because of its meaning.
This was the last goal we scored in the 1997-1998 season, in which we won the Premier League and FA Cup, and I remember it vividly. I was watching it on TV, and we only needed a draw to win the title. We absolutely spanked Everton, 4-0, and this was the last goal.
For me, it signified a changing of the guard. The goalscorer, Tony Adams, was pretty much Mr Arsenal. He was the captain, and he signified everything about the club. His partner in crime in the middle of defence, Steve Bould, was the man who played him through on goal. They were both veterans by this stage, having given decades of service to the club, and this was the beginning of the end for them both.
A new manager had taken over a year or two earlier, and he was beginning to mould the team into his own vision. Adams and Bould wouldn’t last much longer, but Arsenal would carry on, and in fact improve.
I remember crying my eyes out after this goal went in, as it was the first time since I’d started supporting Arsenal that we’d won the league, that we’d proven that we were the best in the land. And for our captain, our hero to score the final goal, the icing on the cake? Well, that was just too much to ask for.
This goal was scored on 3rd May 1998, nearly 12 years ago, and I remember it like it was yesterday. Ask me something that happened last week, and I’d have no idea. This? I’ll remember it as long as I live.
I love snow-covered cars. Reminds me of snowball fights and how cars were the perfect place to make snowballs from. They provided cover, and at the same time easy-to-reach snow at a good height.
Those were the days.
I’ve spent the last hour going through photos from the year I lived in Heidelberg, Germany during 2004-05, and it’s made me realise that I suck at staying in touch with people. I made some amazing friends during my time there, from all over the world, and there’s very few that I still speak to regularly, and even fewer that I have physically seen since we all went our separate ways.
I saw one particularly funny photo and emailed it to one of the girls, along with some general catch-up news, and she just happened to be online. An hour later, chatting, and it seems like only yesterday that we were saying our tearful goodbyes in Heidelberg.
I think I’m going to upload a batch of those photos to facebook, and start a tagging frenzy, just to get back in touch with a load of people. I’m too lazy to write 100 individual emails at the moment.
I’ve heard a rumour that a reunion is planned for some point this summer, as it will will be five years since we were all there. I would love to go, and it’d be great to see some familiar faces once more. I never should’ve let them get away from me, but at least I can try to start talking to them again…
This is from 2006, and is me standing at the entrance to the street in Berlin where I used to live. The flat we were in overlooked all of the sports fields around the Olympic Stadium, particularly those for tennis and hockey.
I remember being able to look down from our balcony and watch the floodlit matches taking place each evening. It was probably my first taste of sport…
EDIT: Holy crap, I was a skinny motherfucker in 2006.
20 years ago tonight, East German border guards allowed East Berliners to cross the border through the middle of Berlin for the first time since 1961. The Berlin Wall, one of the most potent symbols of Communist Europe, fell.
There are hundreds of people who have written about the impact this had historically and culturally, but I’d just like to add one more voice to the torrent.
You see, I was living in Berlin at the time. My dad was in the forces, and we spent nearly two years living in Berlin at the time of the wall coming down. I think we were there from about May 1989 through to early 1991, so for me from the age of 5 until not long after my 7th birthday.
Before the wall came down, and for a while after, the city was divided into four sectors: on the western side of the wall, the British, American and French had separate areas under their administrative control, whereas the Soviets controlled the entire eastern half of the city.
We lived in the British sector, in an area called Charlottenburg right near the Olympic Stadium, and I went to a school for the kids of British military personnel. We shared a playground with a neighbouring German school, but to be honest it was quite an isolated pocket of Britishness that we lived in.
I’ve only got a few memories of my time there, to be honest, but the night when the Wall came down is one of them. We watched it on TV in our flat, and I remember there being very little in the way of commentary during the live pictures, just streams of East Germans coming over the wall, and through the famous Checkpoint Charlie.
The next few days, my dad and I went to the Wall, armed with a mallet, a crowbar and a couple of buckets. In my parents’ garage at home, we still have loads of pieces of the wall that we actually carved out ourselves. Not many have graffiti on them, but they are actual pieces of the wall that I know are genuine.
It was weird being able to go to East Berlin properly. We had certain rights to go before the Wall came down, if memory serves, by virtue of being in the forces and not German, but we did so very infrequently. After the wall came down, the main flow of people was obviously westwards, but it was an eye-opener to be able to travel into East Berlin and see how it really was.
I’ve only been back to Berlin once since I left, and that was a couple of years ago for the World Cup. I went back to the street I used to live, and it was ridiculous how much it has changed. It used to be pretty much only for military personnel, and was well kept, but now it’s basically overgrown and rundown.
I still have a faint scar on my chest from falling out of a tree when I was a kid in the little wood nearby, which will probably stay with me longer than too many memories of the place will.
I really should go back and see Berlin properly, because even in my brief return trip I could see just how dramatic the changes have been.
Geocities finally closes its doors.
Or has its doors closed by Yahoo, whichever. I made my first ever websites on Geocities, at the tail end of the 90s, teaching myself HTML and the value of free hosting. Even then my distaste of advertising was evident, because I figured out the CSS and Javascript which ran the ads in the top corner, and managed to prevent it from displaying. It was a sad little teenage boy’s website, full of nonsense and whatnot, but I’m still pretty proud of the eventual design I settled on. It looked pretty cool, and even had a neat little sliding clam-shell interface for navigation. I maintained that website for a few years, probably until I was about 16-17, and then did a couple of websites for my school’s Sixth Form. One of those almost got me expelled, but that’s a story for another time. I then discovered Blogger.com, where I kept a blog for a couple of years during my university times, and then almost two years ago I ended up on Tumblr, where I’m more than happy. So RIP Geocities, you were my (and many others’) introduction to the world of publishing myself online.
The 90s really was a great time for music. I know that everyone says that about the years during which they first got interested in music, but the 90s had some cracking songs pretty much the whole way through.
I was browsing through the list on Wikipedia of British Number One Singles during the 90s, and it struck me that there were a number of little sequences when one truly fantastic song followed another at the top of the charts.
Usually, I’d expect to see something brilliant replaced by something mediocre but publicised, and this was often the case. However, there are a few months when the British music-buying public were really at the top of their game.
The decade started with a bang, going from Sinead’s epic tearjerker into a little run of early dance tunes during spring, and then the best ever football song (until 1996’s ‘Three Lions’) to support the England team ahead of that summer’s World Cup.
It’s also interesting to see little juxtapositions, where genres collide at the top of the charts. Who knew that two of the most-requested karaoke songs of recent years actually followed one another to the Number One spot at the tail end of 1990?
Ah, the summer of 1993. I remember this period vividly, as it was when I first started seeing music videos rather than the usual live performances on Top of the Pops (RIP). The Freddie Mercury (of Queen fame) was actually a posthumous hit, and it was a remix that got it to the top. I’m amazed that I can sit here and still know all of the words to all six of these songs, and it’s also mind-blowing to think that Meatloaf’s track is 16 years old. How time flies.
Early 1997 saw the start of what was to become the norm from then on, and which lasted until legal downloads became part of the chart: one-week stays at Number One. If you look at the Wikipedia page, the lists for the latter years of the 90s are so much longer than those at the start, with a much quicker turnover of artists and singles. Manufactured pop groups and singers also became more prominent.
This last sequence shows that until this aggressive marketing at young teens really took hold, it was an eclectic mix of genres that made it to Number One. We go from a full-on house track to a one-hit wonder (incidentally, I love this track, a real mellow dancey number), then my favourite Blur tune. Rap gets a look-in, although if memory serves this was as a result of being tied-in with the Beavis & Butthead film more than any real love for LL. Discotheque came from U2’s experiments with electronica on the eponymous album, and then the British public got their first experience of Gwen Stefani.
I really do love the music that came from the 1990s, and still listen to a ridiculous amount of it. I grew up with it, and it helped to shape the musical landscape that I listen to now. As I said at the very beginning, we’re all a bit rose-tinted when it comes to musical history, but I’m one of the biggest fans of the 1990s.
Jurassic Park is on ITV2 at the moment, and if it weren’t for the fact that there’s football on ITV1, I’d be watching it right now. I managed to squeeze in 10 minutes before kick-off, and handily it contained one of my favourite parts: Ian Malcolm’s “That is one big pile of shit” line.
I remember seeing this film in the cinema at the age of eight or nine, and this was probably the first swear word I’d ever heard on screen. Wow. It was then that I knew swearing was cool.
Haven’t seen the film in a few years? Relive the best bits here.
