Vegan Bonnets to play Bestival!

Umm.  It’s been a while - I'm sorry!   My intention to write something halfway meaningful when I finally got round to actually writing anything at all again has gone to the wall, and it may be a while yet.   Oh, I’ve tried, but the words won’t come.  So instead I’ve been spending half an hour or so of an evening these last few weeks looking for them.  And I found some!  I found them online, in a game of Word Link!   

Maybe you know it, a classic test of one’s linguistic prowess (erm, sort of) based on a grid of random letter tiles…  you just have to connect ones that touch each other to try and form as many words as possible. You can increase your score by using special coloured tiles which pop up in each round too.  Fast as you can go… clicking away… it’s not usually too hard to find plenty of three letter words once you get in the swing of it, but it’s especially good when you can form much longer ones, or use up a pesky Q, J or Z for instance, which have higher values than a run-of-the-mill T or A, etc.  I've also noticed  you can get away with both English/US spellings, slang and expletives (it has to be said, 'wanky' usually scores well).

At the end of three minutes the bell rings, a load of fruit falls out out of the sky and the little monkey in a loincloth looks decidedly happy (maybe you have to be there).  Then you find out which two words scored (a) the most points by value and (b) used the most letters.  Like:

Most valuable word: VEGAN

Longest word: BONNETS

And then if you’re like me, you look at those two words at the end of each game and every now and then you think: ha, that could be the name of a band, and you jot it down in the back of your notebook for no other reason than you just like the sound of it and the thought of a band with that name playing at next year's Bestival, or maybe the Exeter Phoenix.  Next thing you know, you don't really care about your final score any more, you just want to play with your new random band name generator.  I'm reminded of those other name generators - like finding your porn star persona by combining the name of your first pet and your mother's maiden name, and the John Peel band name one I remember reading about - take the name of a charity and follow it with a parent's job.  (Mind Cleaner surely should have really existed?)

Thus several games of Word Link later and according to my notebook, it looks as if the Vegan Bonnets are going to be on the same line-up as a number of other interesting sounding acts, such as:

Zee Queens

Jingo Jingo

Cash Reborn (must be a tribute band)

Vox Quarry

Yeti Diners

Ham Panda

Zen Jello
and 

Quim Slings (sorry, but it let me have that so it counts)

I would book my tickets now...