Well, blow me, if Boom Selection isn’t back with avengeance. I swear, the last site was completely pillaged by me in a quest for decent, non-clashy bootlegs in order to play at college bops. Did anyone appreciate them? No, but damnit I did. There’s some seriously wonderful cuts going around at the moment; favourite include Sexual High (Sexual Healing vs High and Dry, perfect in an indescribable way); Mark Ronson’s Ooo-wee against Kylie’s Slow (surprisingly good); and the classic “Kill Yourself”, pitting Loose Yourself against Hotei Tomoyasu’s Battle Without Honour or Humanity. You know, from Kill Bill. It’s mighty.

What is it about bootlegs that gets me going? Don’t know; it’s partly the attitude; yeah, it’s a remix, but it’s also this entirely punk collision of tune and acapella, and yet there’s still a great deal of skill to the art, simply because getting stuff that’s in tune throughout, not just briefly, is the trick. And then you kick yourself, for never realising that x goes with y so well.

It’s a musical joke; it takes the disposability of pop and squares it, throwing original tunes and lyrics out of the window in order to make something new. And yet, every now and then, that something new is something special.

Christ, I’m turning into a Q writer or something. Dreadful. Anyhow: the booms are back. Go download. Go support. And if you’re in Manchester, go to the damn club night.

I got a new mattress today. Or rather, it arrived. Dad picked it up on his way home, and we put it on my bed.

It’s the same mattress I’ve had all my life, ever since I was big enough to go in a real bed. It’s the same bed I’ve had since I was nine. And it now has a nice new mattress – plush for that first inch of “travel” (as it were; god, the bike geek in me comes out again), and then firm and responsive.

And I’m lying on it now. Lying on it in my room, the room I’ve had all my life. The mattress is bare; it needs to air for a while before you cover it the first time. I took the time with no mattress to tidy my room majorly, clear some more shelves, and put another fifty-odd books away. That led to me doing something I’d never wanted to do – double-stacking. There’s no other way to make things fit, other than to have two rows of books, one in front of the other. Sad, but it has to be like that.

So: the room is dim bar my bedside light and the glow of my Powerbook’s LCD, I’m lying on my bed, listening to Kruder & Dorfmeister, typing wirelessly onto the internet. Oh, and I have a new kick-ass haircut.

I may be a geek, but if the nine-, twelve-, fifteen-year-old me looked in through the doorway now, he’d have probably thought me quite cool. Well, he’d be surprised how well he’d dress when he was older.

And now, even though I’m hoping to hit the next phase of life, to move out of the family home – my home for twenty-one years and four months – I have a new mattress to bed in. Perhaps soon I’ll be employed and not be around to use the new mattress. If I’m still here, I’ll make good use of the mattress, dreaming of the days when I won’t wake up on it. It almost seems like I’ve jinxed myself.

Never mind. It was going to happen anyway; my back was growing to hate the old one.

Slight redesign. Everything recently seems to have been reaching hiatus, and I’m trying to break out of that. I want to write more, but the format of this was overpowering – I kept writing too-big bits in the “brief” column, which probably would have done for the main column, but it sometimes frightens me; it demands titles, authority. Not any more. Titles are gone. Dates are reduced in importance. The asterisk motif comes out a bit better, and the text shines through.

Also, I am going to write more here now.

So the Raleigh Chopper has returned. Lots of nostalgic men will no doubt be queueing up to buy one of the 2004 that have been made, to relieve their youth with some terrifying handling and ludicrous handlebars. But if you’re going to buy a sit-up-and-beg bike… why not go the whole hog (literally), and buy something like this: The Kona BikeHotRod. Now that’s a real chopper. And it’s got a disc brake!

(OK, so it’s bike geekery, but I just wanted to point out that there are alternatives to the Chopper…)