I'd Like To Stab People Who Talk AT Gigs In The Neck. With A Knife.

When you go to one of the Academy venues in Manchester you invariably end up with a flyer listing the gigs which are on in Manchester for the forthcoming months. Bar for the obvious reason of finding out who is on and where, you also get to roughly find out whether a band is on its way up or slowly fading away to inevitable death.
The Manchester venues can roughly be listed in size, starting with the largest they can be put in the following order:

MEN Arena, Apollo, Academy 1, Academy 2, Academy 3.

There are other venues such as the Roadhouse, Night & Day and Life Café which can be considered on a par with the Academy 3, maybe slightly smaller. If you want to go bigger than the Arena then it has to be a stadium. So, factoring out bands that are deliberately playing smaller and more "intimate" tours you can see what stage in its career a band is in.
Bloc Party played the Academy 1 last week and will be playing the Apollo for two nights in October. On the way up. About five years ago you would have expected JJ72 to be playing the Academy 1 as they were quite popular. Instead they are playing the Academy 3. On the way down. Let's have a winners and losers list.

Winners
Kaiser Chiefs, Bloc Party, The Arcade Fire, The Futureheads, Audioslave.

Losers
Melanie C, A, JJ72, The Coral.


Chris was investigating on the internet about the calorie values of various alcoholic drinks. As he was doing this he stumbled across a site listing vegetarian beers/wines etc.

Here is the link. What is bizarre is that the list is maintained by a guy who worked with us for several years. I never knew that Geraint was a vegetarian, I only knew him as the metal-looking geezer who did the fuel software modelling.
It appears that several of my favourite tipples aren't vegetarian. I shall be avoiding them from now on.