At the risk of turning tossr into Yet Another YouTube Blog, I really really must share this with you; 55 videos of (mostly) early 90s hardcore. Iffy happy hardcore tunes notwithstanding, this is the stuff I grew up with: The Theme, Stakker Humanoid (caution: may cause seizures), Bombscare, LFO, and the mighty Some Justice, mostly captured from old tapes of MTV’s Party Zone (which I used to religiously tape every Friday night) back in the days when white gloves and Vicks VapoRub reigned supreme in raves across the land, and all you needed for a chart smash was a crusty old funk break sped up to 140BPM welded to the theme from a children’s TV classic. Ahh, heady days.

Perhaps later in the week I’ll compile a post with even more of my favourites; for now, though, I’ll leave you with the distinctly odd combination of the aforementioned Stakker Humanoid and The Osmonds’ Crazy Horses:

Andrew Collins mentions tipping barbers today (something he’s touched on previously).

I’m never sure myself what to tip; it usually costs £3.50 for my haircut (clippers all over at a backstreet salon) so I’ll hand over a fiver and say “That’s fine, thanks”, which I feel gets across the message that they can keep the rest without resorting to the potentially patronising “Keep the change”.

(”Potentially patronising”? In my mind, yes; if I said that to someone I’d feel like the kind of person who ostentatiously lights their cigars with banknotes in order to impress others with their flagrantly vulgar display of wealth and contempt. “Keep the change, love, and don’t spend it all at once!”)

However, the last time I went it had gone up to £4.50. I only had a fiver on me and some very loose change, so in an instant I had to decide which I would find most embarrassing; handing over a paltry 50p tip, or rooting around in my pocket and handing over a fistful of coppers and silvers. I decide on the former option; I hate digging out change for a tip in front of someone like that, it makes me think I should be flipping the coin into their gratefully outstretched palm. So, a 50p tip for a haircut; is that actually better than nothing, or is it an insultingly low amount? I don’t know really. Honestly, it’s a minefield this tipping lark.

Speaking of tipping, what’s the accepted rule for tipping in a coffee shop? When you tip in a restaurant you’re rewarding good service and good cooking, with both of them usually having an effect on the amount you put down (unless you’re the kind of person who rigidly adheres to a 15% rule or whatever). However, in a coffee shop the tip jar is right there in front of the till, so if you tip then you’re effectively tipping the service, as you don’t know whether the coffee you’re about to have is actually any good or not; it could be the best mocha ever or it could be two-thirds foam, and you’ve no idea which it’ll be until you’ve tried it — by which time you’ve left the counter, so you’re going to have to go back, push past the rest of the queue and drop your coins into the jar. How gauche!

As you may have noticed, I hate tipping ostentatiously; or at least, I hate doing it myself. If you want to show off about your tipping then I really don’t care either way, but when I come to tip I want to do it quietly and discreetly. I’m not exaggerating for comedic effect, either; when I do tip in my favourite coffee shop (where the tip jar is a shallow-but-wide cup) I’ll virtually touch the money that’s already in there with my fingertips and let the tip slide off my palm and down my fingers to avoid the attention-grabbing clink of coins. I’d rather nobody knew I’d just tipped than draw attention to it. Who cares if I’d get a better coffee if the barista knew I’d just tipped? At least I haven’t made a song-and-dance about it.

Apologies for the lack of any recent activity; I’ve currently got a mammoth post percolating on my Zodiac — or at least, it feels like a mammoth post when you’re writing it in Graffiti. It’s probably less than 100 words but my stylus hand would certainly beg to differ. Anyway, there may be posts before that one or there may not; at the moment my brain seems to have melted in the summer sun like a discarded ice-cream cone, and I’m finding it hard to do anything other than eat and sleep (although once or twice I’ve successfully been able to communicate with my fellow brain-melted colleagues in a primitive language of grunts).

In the meantime (and regular readers may be able to guess what I’m about to post), here’s a nice YouTube video; this time, it’s Matt Kirkby’s glorious promo for Roots Manuva’s Witness. Enjoy!