>> My, what a pretentious title.

Anyway, welcome back to a DYFL.com that is finally in working order (hopefully). As you can see, things have changed. Significantly. I'm gonna trust that we're all clever boys and girls and can pick up a feel for the navigation pretty quickly, but you may want to cast a glance over the About and Archives pages to see where things lie in the new world order.

I've had quite a time of it in the period since the site went off-line. I ruined my life and then fixed it again, not to sound too melodramatic about it, but it was a complicated situation which involved several people, not all of whom should be dragged into it, so. Suffice it to say that things are, provisionally, going well again, and that that cryptic little blurb is all you're really going to get about it.

I've seen, heard, and done a lot of fascinating things in the past month as well, and hopefully, I'll write about as many of those as possible (and show you pictures of them) over the coming weeks in the various blogs that now make up this site. This is a configuration I've been playing with for almost a year now, so to finally see it up and running is very, very satisfying. We'll see how long it takes for it to go horribly, horribly off the rails.

So. That's all there is to say for now. We're back on the air, and happy to be for once. Thanks for being patient with me, and I hope you get paid back for it.

(I'm sure there are still loose, buggy ends floating around the place... if you find any, go ahead and let me know so I can fix 'em. And if you've got any suggestions for how to make the new arrangement run even better, I'd love to hear them!)

>> Don't be alarmed by the silence that has preceded this post, and the silence that will follow it (I don't know for how long -- anywhere from several hours to several days). It just means good things are happening. Well, maybe good. Don't want to jinx it, after all.

Just picture a couple thousand of these guys swarming all over the site, and you've got the idea.

Clatter, crash, clack, assorted other construction sounds.

Oh, and to any UKBloggers who happen to be reading this -- I may see you there.

>> There's really not much to say, to be terribly honest, but I don't want to leave the depressing, irrationally-angry mugging post up on the frontpage for too long. So three cheers for a filler post!

Actually, it's been a good few days -- met up with Simon for the first time, and that was certainly not a "filler post" experience. We took in the Tate Modern, strolled about the centre of the City, and, as all of my friends can attest, spending more than two hours with me inevitably means that you'll end up in a CD store, and that we did. He also helped me to pick out a mobile phone, which I refrained from purchasing until today (huzzah! No more phone booths!). If you'd like the number and don't already have it, then (a.) ask yourself if you really deserve it and (b.) e-mail me.

I'm in the process of going through Nick Cave's NOCTURAMA as we speak (as the sidebar has already, no doubt, informed you); a brilliant and fully-developed opinion is coming soon (ha ha; a semi-syllabic grunt of "Sgood" is more likely). "Bring It On" is owning my world at the moment, though. Especially the video. I'm told the Cave / director conversation went like this:

CAVE: So what kind of video gets on MTV these days?

DIRECTOR: Well, generally it's got black girls shaking their asses in it.

CAVE: OK, let's do one of those.

That's how you get things done, ladies and gentlemen. (And for the record, I did not get the super-duper bonus edition of the album with the 15-minute "Babe, I'm On Fire" DVD, since I don't have a Region 2 player. Sigh.)

>> So on Wednesday night at 6:30 PM, I'm in a phone booth on Great Russell Street, just east of Tottenham Court Road, trying to call one of my friends to see if he wants to go out to dinner (I've got an hour to kill before I have to go see a play for class down in Soho). A guy knocks on the door of the payphone and mutters something incomprehensible.

"I'll just be a minute," I say, annoyed, since he's interrupted me dialing in my calling card number and now I'll have to redo it. He opens the door of the booth.

"You sure 'bout that?" he says.

"Uh, yeah, I am, just a minute and --"

"Listen, just don't scream, OK? Just don't scream." He is now pointing a rolled-up newspaper into the booth. "All I've got to do is press a button, OK?" Well, shit. He probably does not, in fact, have a switch-blade under there, but fuck this, why take a chance? "Gimme a tenner."

I take out my wallet and give him what I have, which is twenty-five pounds. He notices that I have a debit card, and proceeds to direct me out of the booth. "Go to the cashpoint," he says, "there's one around the corner. Don't do somethin' stupid, I'm faster than you." This is clearly not true; he's eight inches shorter than I am and my height is all in my legs. Plus, this man is clearly not in ideal physical shape. But y'know, is it worth it? The safe, wussy side of me that almost always asserts control thinks "No." We start walking.

"You're helpin' me out man," he says as we walk down the street. "Someone stabbed my girlfriend, I gotta, I gotta get out of here." I'm sobbing for you, my friend. Honestly. "Do you want any drugs? I can get you some drugs, anything." I am not making this up.

"No thanks," I say, as venomously as I can without sounding threatening.

We come up to the cash point on Bloomsbury Street. I am literally within sight of the NYU in London campus building. Superb location choice, guys. There are people at the cashpoint, and this man is making no real attempt at secrecy: he is obviously mugging me right in front of them. "Take out a hundred pounds," he says, none too quietly. People begin floating away out of line.

I do what I can to punch in my pin number without him seeing it. "I ain't gonna take your number, man," he assures me. This, actually, is true; he's made no attempt at taking my cards, and my iPod is on me, the headphones clearly visible, and he hasn't tried to take it. He just wants cash, because at this point it's fairly obvious that he needs crack or probably heroin. I withdraw the money and give it to him. "Take out another hundred."

"I can assure you I don't have it," I tell him, sounding bizarrely eloquent.

"Try."

I do. I don't.

"Try fifty."

I don't have that either.

Vaguely satisfied, he says "OK." We walk away from the cashpoint. He tries to shake my hand. I give him my best "I truly want you to die" look, but I think I might have actually shaken his hand anyway; at this point I'm looking over his shoulder prepared to charge over to the NYU center. He mumbles something about "Call the police, I don't care," and trots off.

So I go over to the NYU center and talk to the guard on duty, the assistant director, etc. etc. I still have to go see this play tonight. "Bet you don't fancy goin' now, eh?" asks the guard. In reality, other than step on the throat of the guy who just took my money (or re-live the event so that I throw him in front of a bus or something), a funny little show sounds pretty excellent. The assistant director calls over to the Holborn police station to tell them what's happened, and that I'll come in the next day to report it since I've got coursework to do tonight.

I go see the play. It's pretty fucking funny; a (predominantly) mime show (but with rather a bit of dialogue) based on the short stories of Flannery O'Connor. It closes today or tomorrow, I think, but if you're in London it's not a bad show -- it's called A Little Fantasy, it's done by Told By An Idiot, and it's playing at the Soho Theatre on Dean Street. (UPDATE: Did some research, like bloggers are supposed to. It does, in fact, close tonight, February 1st, and here's some info.)

Past that, I've simply jumped through the hoops of London police bureaucracy for the last couple of days. To be quite honest, I'd hoped it would be more interesting and that I'd have something fascinating to blog about, but alas, it mainly involved waiting in line at various departments. They were universally pretty nice and clear about the whole thing, so that's good. This morning I hauled myself way out to Kentish Town to look at suspect photographs, which isn't as exciting as you might figure. Though there are some weird-lookin' folks in this world, I can tell you now.

The good news is that apparently, as long as I sign an affadavit, my bank will replace the £100 taken off me from fraud, which is fairly excellent, since that's a sizeable chunk of cash. And of course, the whole thing was non-violent, thank God, and I'm not really too scarred by the experience -- shit happens, y'know? I'm sure as fuck not going to use a payphone alone anymore (in fact, I'm getting a mobile in the next couple of days -- something inexpensive and pay-as-you-go, so if anyone's got any suggestions, leave 'em in the comments or e-mail), and I'm more cautious (and pessimistic) on the whole, but it went much better than it could have. At the end of the day, I'm OK, so that's a good thing, right?

It's getting hard to say that I like London too much, though.