The German mince shall power my trains and missile program!

I have become addicted to CIV 3. I get obsessed about things easily, and this often manifests itself around computer games (I love them so) but it's cool to have a game that allows my brain to occupy itself by thinking of attack strategies against Germans, rather than beating itself up about something it can do nothing about.
I played till about 12 last night, I actually made sure I went to bed before I started a big barney with the Germans (who are quite evil and aggressive it, the French though seem quite nice and peaceful).
I always play as the English, I have very little patriotic blood in me in real life (bar the cricket and the fact I'll cheer on any Brits at the Olympics like a mad 'un), but find myself wanting to represent the mother country in a computer game. Freak.
Anyway, I was nicely set up in the game. It was the year 1750 and I was already highly advanced (I'd just invented computers). Everybody else was still stuck in the Middle Ages so I don't think it will cost
me much effort to roll my tanks into the German cities, after the precious coal that I seek so much. And if some of the evil German pixel people are turned to the pixel based dead equivalent of the pixel person, then that is just a cost of war. A righteous war over coal!

Liverpool's season starts tonight, with a champions league qualifier. I don't know what to expect, mainly because what I thought would happen in the summer quite clearly hasn't. I thought the new manager would come in, get rid of lots of players and bring in some quality replacements. Well so far he's got rid of a few but has only bought a Spanish right-back. Now I hear rumours that Owen is going to Real Madrid. Why wasn't this done earlier in the summer? Did Mr. Benitez's calendar not warn him that the season was about to start?
Maybe tonight will prove me wrong but at the moment I have no more confidence in them than last year.

Embrace. Embrace.
Embrace are back and I am quite excited. It's taken a while though for this to get going because of the comeback single. The first single Gravity is not actually an Embrace penned song, but one written by Chris Martin from Coldplay. When I first heard this my heart sank, but I hoped it would be along the same lines as the one decent Coldplay song (The Scientist). I've heard Gravity a lot now and it still does little for me. When I first heard it on the tele with the accompanying video I got a bit more excited. But not that much.
I don't know if I'm judging it because it IS a Coldplay song, I just personally find Embrace songs to be so passionate, beautiful and heartfelt that it just won't do hearing one of their songs when it is written by somebody who doesn't engender these feeling in me.
Maybe I'll relax with it over time, I'm not so sure. Yet I spent some time the other day reading about the B-sides for the single, and of the other album tracks. According to people in the know, the rest of the album blows Gravity out of the water. THIS made me excited.
I can see why the record company have done this, they want to get Coldplay fans to buy the only Chris Martin penned record they'll be able to get their hands on for a while, and hopefully in turn raise the profile of a band which have been AWOL since early 2002. If it works then great, I'd have been gutted if the comeback single was fantastic but charted at number 23.
We're going to see Embrace in Preston later this month. If I think about I get giddy, so my brain isn't letting me at the moment. We then travel to London to see them a few days later, and then again in Manchester after that. Wheee!
They'd better not let me down.

Right, what have I done lately?
Last Saturday we had a gathering. Most of my friends came round and I think everybody had a nice time. I was a bit pissed but only slightly obnoxious. It was unbearably warm so we sat in the front garden for most of the night. This was quite cool.
We did get a 1am visit from two ultra-skanky girls, their badly applied make-up smeared around their badly designed faces. They wanted to steal cigarettes, ask if we had Paul's number (they didn't mean our Paul) and if they could use the toilet. One became annoyed when I said no to this latter request, that she didn't like the way I was talking to her friend. Tough shit. They left after a few minutes towards Moor Park, after stealing Paul's last fag.
We've also been to Xian and Sian's house, where I remember playing monkey-bowling against a drunk Dave.