Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Last night, I met a man who claimed to be a millionaire. Bizarrely, this is the second time this has happened, and both situations were incredibly random. Which is why I think these stories need to be told...

Millionaire number one was a very strange Irish man who I encountered in Sunderland one night when out drinking with a few friends. My initial introduction to him was when I heard him laughing just after a girl had fallen down a full flight of particularly painful looking stairs in a bar. Everyone immediately kicked off about the fact that he was laughing, so he looked for a quick escape route. Being the nearest person to him at the time, he began to talk to me. I then tried to get rid of him by returning to my other friends, but he just wouldn't take "go away" for an answer and decided to tag along. He then paid himself and 3 of us into the next bar / club / thing. It was at some point in the queue that he mentioned being a millionaire, and wanting to spend his money with some good friends. How he got his riches remains a mystery... if he was even as rich as he claimed to be. How he has no friends better than us was easy to find out.

Inside the bar he showed very little social skills, grabbing a barmaid by the arm to get her attention, shouting "Oi!" at a barman to get his attention, and slapping various blokes on the arse for no reason whatsoever. He was a terrifying man to be around, but we thought he would eventually get a round in with the wads of cash he was waving around. He didn't. He did, however, invite us to his private box at the Sunderland stadium for a football match the next day. We politely declined as he was a complete mentalist. After a short while, he said or did something stupid to a bunch of guys nearby, and then told us to leave as he was about to get into a fight. We haven't seen him since, thankfully.

Millionaire number two was essentially just a horrendously drunken Asian man with lots of money about his person. He stumbled into The Brudenell in Leeds with a pint in his hands, even though the bar was already closed. He started dancing to The Pattern Theory who were playing the encore of their headline set. Then he started shouting and trying to get me and Jeff of Juffage fame to dance with him. We politely declined but he began to be a nuisance. So, the promoter asked him to leave. When he refused to do so, his pint was confiscated and taken outside, but he then paid the full entry price to come back in for the last 1-2 minutes of the last song of the night.

During this mess, he had been waving his money around, and he did have quite a lot of cash on him. I hope for his sake that he didn't get mugged on the way home, as he wouldn't have a clue what happened the next day. After the gig had ended, he continued to be annoying in front of the merch stand, potentially explaining the lack of sales after the bands had finished. Then he got into a fight with some bloke who was trying to get him to spend all of his riches on our merchandise, which sadly didn't work.

The real highlight of his presence was when he finally decided to go home. It took him about four attempts to get his leather jacket on (more specifically, to get his arms in the correct sleeves), and then proceeded to do the whole "OK, I'm going now, bye!" thing several times before actually going, even though no one was paying him much attention.

I wonder if either of these two chaps were actually loaded... or just mental...?

The Poster Theory

As you may have noticed, I haven't posted anything here for a while. This is because I've been really busy for a change. One of the many things occupying my time of late has been the organisation of a gig for The Pattern Theory, and the designing of the posters for the event.

As I type this, the gig is now just a week away and everything seems to be coming together at last. The gig posters were placed in various record shops and bars in Sunderland and Newcastle, including within the venue itself. However, someone decided to specifically tear down and screw up all of the posters in the venue and the bar opposite for some reason. Thankfully, I also got a load of flyers done so hopefully people will still hear about it.

The venue itself also printed out a couple of the same posters, but at A1 and A0(!) size. The A1 version can be seen on the outside of the venue:

Here it is again, with a bit of zoom action:

The A0 size one is supposedly inside the venue at the top of the stairs, but I haven't been in the main room since it was put up... just the little room for a gig or two. I've already been told I can have the massive one after the gig though, which is a pretty cool souvenir as far as I'm concerned! I think I'll attempt to get everyone who's playing to sign it too.

I've also designed some similar posters to sell on the night in question (and at the band's earlier Leeds date). These are A3 colour prints, with four different designs available. All the patterns are taken from my first set of triangle rubber stamp experiments. I got 30 of each design printed, making 120 in total. This is what they look like on my wall:

They seem to blend in with my boring wallpaper rather a lot.

You may notice that the top left design is slightly paler than the other three. This wasn't deliberate. The first of the four designs, as used on all the flyers and posters, was stamped directly onto some fancy card, then scanned. I did this specifically rather than stamping on white and copying it over, so as to get a more warm and natural appearance to the picture. However, the other 3 designs were stamped on white as I don't have any more fancy card like that.

The background for those posters is a scan of the back of the same piece of card that I used for the first one, but for some strange reason it came out slightly darker. The stamped designs were also tampered with in terms of colour saturation, so as to mimic the first design instead of appearing in their original stark grey colour scheme.

Anyway, I'm still pretty pleased with the four designs and after asking a few people which design they prefer, each one has had a few votes. This is helpful as I was worried about selling out of one design quickly and still having 30 left of another.