Skip to main content

Andy Parsons

By
I first heard of Andy Parsons when he was on Radio 2 in the early naughties with Parsons and Naylor’s Pull-out Section. That’s also where I first encountered the marvelous Lucy Porter. I have of course since seen him on Mock the Week, etc. and he’s a very funny guy.
Tonight at the Playhouse in Norwich, Andy Parsons had the whole audience laughing from beginning to end. I really like the fact that at the moment most comedians seem to be out on the road on their own. This means you get two halves with the same comedian and don’t have to suffer some unknown before getting to a set that isn’t long enough from the main act after the interval. It also appears to be the done thing for comedians to do their own intro from off stage as well. This feels rather narcissistic to me, but is often very funny.
Observational humour is so much better when you can relate to it and Andy Parsons described much that I could relate to. He’s more than just an unusual voice. I have often been frustrated by so called security measures when phoning banks, especially if they’ve called me! And I recently had a trip to the doctors where he told me plenty I didn’t want to hear. I wish I had a quiet place where I could hide, like Andy does. The only criticism I have of Andy Parsons is that he uses the F word far too often (which at least one friend of mine has said is a bit rich coming from me). There was of course the obligatory single use of the C word as well and he did a joke about car number plates that was identical to part of Lucy Porter’s set the week before.

When Andy Parsons comes back to Norwich, I think we’ll be back to see him.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv
Post a Comment
Read more

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th
22 comments
Read more

Bloodstock 2009

By
This year was one of the best Bloodstock s ever, which surprised me as the line up didn't look too strong. I haven't come away with a list of bands I want to buy all the albums of, but I did enjoy a lot of the performances. Insomnium[6] sound a lot like Swallow the Sun and Paradise Lost. They put on a very good show. I find a lot of old thrash bands quite boring, but Sodom[5] were quite good. They could have done with a second guitarist and the bass broke in the first song and it seemed to take ages to get it fixed. Saxon[8] gave us some some classic traditional heavy metal. Solid, as expected. The best bit was, following the guitarist standing on a monitor, Biff Bifford ripped off the sign saying "DO NOT STAND" and showed it to the audience. Once their sound was sorted, Arch Enemy[10] stole the show. They turned out not only to be the best band of the day, but of the festival, but then that's what you'd expect from Arch Enemy. Carcass[4] were very disappoin
1 comment
Read more