It’s not going to surprise anyone at all that I am being an absolute slob today, is it?  Mrs. Toad got back from Australia around lunchtime, and after a few hours of pottering about she crashed out with jetlag, so I snuck off to record the podcast.  I am sure that soon enough she will wake and start demanding attention and general servitude soon enough, so I better get this over with quickly.

After that I am going straight back to bed to watch stupid films while my sweetheart dozes by my side, awaking occasionally to tell me off for not being comfortable enough, or to send me to fetch her things, or to just swear at me for taking all the covers or some other such sweet nothings of the kind she is wont to come out with from time to time.

Direct download: Toadcast #148 – The Slobcast

01. Elvis Perkins in Dearland – Shampoo (00.21)
02. Elvis Costello – Couldn’t Call it Unexpected No.4 (06.24)
03. Billie Holiday – Good Morning Heartache (13.17)
04. Smog – In the Pines (16.22)
05. My Tiny Robots – Ballad of the Mapmaker’s Daughter (23.17)
06. Randolph’s Leap – Going Home (32.19)
07. The Japanese War Effort – Face Like a Lemon (Ivor Cutler cover, live on Fresh Air Radio) (36.50)
08. Grass House – Lazy Bones (43.01)
09. Bob Dylan – I’ll Keep it With Mine (49.23)
10. Bettye Swann – Don’t Look Back (54.47)

Another day, and another week pootles by.  Are there more made up, gibberish and yet entirely understandable words for pottering about that anything else?  Is it the English equivalent of the Eskimos and their bazillion words for snow?  Mrs. Toad always accuses the cat of ‘foostering about’ somewhere.  Dylan from Blueback Hotrod is forever going on about ‘bimbling’ off somewhere.

It’s all gibberish, but you all know exactly what it means, don’t you?  It’s obviously just something we English speakers take great pride in: doing something without any real sense of purpose and perfectly happy to be distracted at the slightest notice.

Anyhow, last week Matt from StayLoose PR, who arranged the Mumford & Sons Toad Session for us, asked that it be published on a Friday, to help him give it as much publicity as possible, and given that he’d gone to great lengths for us and that a bit of help with publicity is always welcome, I fucked with your Friday Fives to satisfy the whims of The Man.  The Man in this case being Matt. Who is by all accounts a man.  Raarrrr!

Anyhow, in the comments last week we had Outraged of Adelaide (Agnes from It All Started With Carbon Monoxide) actually filling in an imaginary five and, honestly, the results were fucking hilarious.  So this week’s five is actually Agnes’ five answers, and instead of coming up with answers, this week I would like you all to try and guess what the questions which Agnes was answering in her head actually were.

And just the Mumfords Session was mentioned in the Guardian today, and therefore we might have a few more Guardian readers here than usual, I feel obliged to mention once again that yes, of course, I did pinch the idea for the Friday Fives from the Guardian Talk boards, so don’t whinge.

So here you go, try and figure out what the question was:

1. Roadkill – it’s the other white meat.
2. A strategically-placed eyepatch.
3. I wouldn’t know, I have a horse.
4. Desperate fucking Housewives.
5. The bloody Dum Dum Girls.  Shudder.

These five songs come from living in a flat in Surbiton with a girl I should never have been with, cheating on her like a fucker, breaking up with her, her moving out and then getting my whole deposit back on the flat because the lady felt sorry for me being abandoned.  I am a much nicer person these days, I promise.  But I am NOT the sort of person who should ever live in Surbiton.

Belle & Sebastian – Women’s Realm

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Elvis Costello – 15 Petals

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Tom McRae – End of the World News

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Richard Hawley – Baby, You’re My Light

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The Gentle Waves – Emmanuelle, Skating on Thin Ice

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You know, I fucking hate iTunes.  I hate i-fucking-Tunes for much the same reason that I hate fucking Macs in general.  They are designed for people who don’t fucking know how to use Explorer, for Christ’s sake.  Or Finder or whatever the bastard is called on a Mac.

It drives me nuts.  If you import photos using iPhoto then you cannot find those files in Finder.  It’s fucking ludicrous.  You have to use the search function and then when it tells you where they are you can’t actually reach that path conventionally through Finder, it will only show you the bloody things through search. Basically, you have to use iPhoto, which I would frankly prefer not to do because then your old, imported photos end up in a different place from your new ones.  “Ah, but they’re all on iPhoto”, say the smarmy, gurning Macintosh twats.  Well I don’t fucking like i-fucking-Photo and I would like to be able to choose not to fucking use it.

iTunes is the fucking same.  It’s a spectacularly stupid program, and it refuses to let you organise your music properly.  It loses files, it won’t watch a folder properly, there’s no Explorer functionality in the left-hand sidebar, it’s fucking dreadful.  All my music in a great big long list, are you fucking joking?  Do you have any idea how much music I actually have?  I’ll get RSI in my bloody scrolling finger, you fucking turkeys.

The worst is the watch folder situation though.  Basically, everything I buy or I get sent to me goes into a folder called On Trial, which is always changing as things either get deleted or moved to another folder, for the keepers, called Music Library.  Winamp and Mediamonkey are both capable of keeping an eye on both of these folders and updating accordingly.  iTunes is incapable of doing that.  Most music fans like to organise their collections and keep things where they want them, but what use is software that can’t keep up with that.  Mediamonkey can’t be installed on a Mac at all, and I am raging because it’s brilliant software, and I want to use it.

Basically, Macs seem do be designed for people who don’t want to use computers and I fucking despise them.  I will organise my own files thank you very much, you fucking keep your playschool cartoon kiddie computer hands off the bastards.

Marc Carroll – Idiot World
Elvis Costello – How to Be Dumb
Close Lobsters – Just too Bloody Stupid

Ah thank goodness. The weekend, beer o’clock, beverage time, whatever – slipping into the welcoming arms of comatose alcoholic oblivion, no knowing where you’ll wake, next to whom or how many tattoos you’ll have. Marvellous.

The Edinburgh International Festival of Unbearably Pretentious Thespian Twattery commences this week some time and suppressing the Toad instinct for homicidal artistic criticism will be extremely difficult. It is a trying duty, but one which I nonetheless take very seriously, to have to reduce one aspiring performer after another to tears of desolation by relentlessly driving home the fact that what they are doing, rather than opening anyone’s heart to the possibilities of releasing their inner beauty, is in fact just some sort of pestilential form of spasmodic social syphilis. In fact, rather than giving people the opportunity to think differently about their lives what you are in fact doing, sweetie darling, is pissing everybody off, distracting them from their pints and making an utter twat of yourself in the process.

Congratulations. Won’t you be proud of your pointless fairying about, come the final reckoning:
St Peter: “And how spent thou thy precious earthly days?”
Eternal Soul 1: “Well, St Peter, I worked tirelessly on a cure for cancer.”
St Peter: “Splendid my son, on ye go. And your hippy friend here?”
Eternal Soul 2: “Erm, well, see I tried to express challenging thoughts through the medium of interpretive dance and bongo drums.”
St Peter: “You silly cunt.”

Who’s worse – the poncing thesps themselves or the fat fucking American tourists and crinkly old British coffin-dodgers who give them just enough financial encouragement that they somehow do not end up sticking their fucking knobs in a blender by the end of the Festival and thus relieving the gene pool of their weak and flabby genetic material altogether. Gah. Well at least there are some decent bands playing in Edinburgh for a change. Not many mind, but a couple.

I console myself with beer, gin, music and fornication. Breathe in with me Toadlets… and out… and relaaaaax!

Ad Astra Per Aspera – Everybody Lets Me Down
Elvis Costello – Clubland
Mayor McCA – I Love the Summer ‘Cause I Love the Women
Richard Cheese – Rock the Casbah I think this may now be the definitive version of this song.
Talking Heads – Radio Head