Madness I tell you, madness!

I was about to write something but before I do, something else just popped in to my head - if Holland is the Netherlands, does that make Dutch towns Nether Regions? Hmmmm.

Anyway, moving on (quickly) - people say that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness, but I'm not so sure. I went drinking last Friday with a load of people I'd never met before other than through chatting to them online. That to me seems like the first sign of madness - I was fully expecting to be given some robes and a suicide pill before the end of the evening.

As it turned out it was a great evening - I got to meet some very nice people and chat about bees, which is always the mark of a good night. Ok so I fell asleep on the train and ended up with a fifty quid cab fare home but these things happen.

The thing is, I basically learnt that by grabbing life by the balls you can have a lot of fun.

So, whether it's badger baiting with David Attenborough, poking sharks or throwing rocks at wasp nests, just get out there and do it, before you miss your chance. Otherwise who knows what you'll miss out on.

Next time on 'stating the fucking obvious....'

Wasps

It's a lovely day, I'm sat in the garden in the sunshine the morning after an almighty pissup that saw the best part of an off-license consumed by about seven people. We've tidied up, done the washing up and got the barbeque back out for a nice healthy breakfast of burgers, sausages and more lager.

Of course, days like this are always marred by one of the most pointless creatures on the planet (no, not Jodie Marsh) - wasps.

Just what is the point of them. They fly around, trying to go for a swim in your pint and stinging people for no apparent reason. The little shits. Bees I don't have a problem with, they pollenate flowers and make honey (for more information on this see Eddie Izzard's 'Unrepeatble' DVD), and spiders catch flies and make gravy. Wasps however should all die.

Mind you, it wouldn't be summer without them would it, and you can always get them pissed on Vodka and watch them fly shakily across the beer garden. Which is always good for shits and giggles.

Badger badger badger badger

I went to a wedding yesterday, out in the sticks at some golf club or other. It was a lovely sunny day and a good time was had by all. Even the groom.

A few of us had to leave early (ish) as we had a bit of a drive and a Metallica gig today so we jumped in the car and headed off down one of the country lanes back towards civilisation and a lack of golfing slacks. As we came around a corner we saw something fairly large in the road. Too big for a fox it took us a couple of seconds to process what we were seeing, and then all three of us in the car shouted in unison "it's a fucking BADGER!".

We've all always wanted to see a real badger, and there it was, jogging across our path! It's only taken 29 years but I can tick that goal off my 'things to do before I die' list. Happy days indeed

Social networking - killing social lives?

I'm currently a member of three social networking sites on the web - MySpace, Facebook (poke!) and Fridaycities London, which you probbaly won't have heard of but that doesn't matter because you can only join if you're invited. Fridaycities is more like a forum than something like Facebook but you have a profile and stuff like that too.

The amount of time one can spend interacting with people in various ways on these sites is quite scary - you can easily rack up a good few hours an evening - especially if a decent topic of conversation comes up on a forum type site like FCL.

The thing is, it's so easy to spend huge amounts of time on these types of sites that you could potentially end up spending more time interacting with people online than actually interacting with people down the pub. Which is sad.

I would head down the pub, but I've got to check to see if anyone's poked me on Facebook....

I'm back

Yeah yeah, I know. It's been far too long since I last posted, but you get to read this shit for free so you can't really complain if I don't write for a few weeks can you? No.

I guess part of the problem is that my creative talent is currently being stretched across a number of outlets - there's the blog, the email I send out to my work colleagues every week, a website that I post on fairly regularly, the pub.... Lame excuse? Probably, but apparently I'm Emo, which I suppose would at least explain the apathy.....

So this week I've been looking after my brothers cat, and it's been a complete nightmare. I've looked after cats before and had no problems, but my brother's cat, Hector, is a complete bastard. Seriously, I'm ready to kill him - I've already considered giving him away to the first person that wants him. I've compiled a list to show what I mean:

Hector's crimes

• Crying every time I shut a door behind me for some peace and quiet / to eat dinner
• Biting me
• Biting my girlfriend
• Malting (whilst sitting in the bath)
• Drinking my milkshake from my glass
• Putting the laces of my converse in the milkshake after I stopped him drinking it
• Headbutting my hand whilst I was pouring out his food causing me to spill biscuits all over the floor
• Trying to eat my sunglasses
• Shitting on my brothers' bed

Yes, that does say shitting, not sitting.

So, if anyone wants a free Persian Blue please let me know, I'll stick him in the post.

Norwich Union scare tactics

I've just seen possibly the most threatening advert in history. IT was for Norwich Union insurance. Basically there was a family playing in the garden with Ross Kemp looking at them, then he turns to the camera and says something like "Family are the most important thing in your life".

So unless I'm much mistaken, Norwich Union are basically saying if you don't take out their insurance they're going to send Ross Kemp around to kill your family. Which is nice.

100th post

That's right kids, this is my 100th post! It hardly seems possible that this blog survived that long! It just proves people will read any old shit on the internet really doesn't it?

I'm going to quickly have a rant because I'm so very fed up with South Eastern Trains - they really are shite. I used to think "oh well, at least they're better than Connex" but this morning I decided they aren't (well, except for the fact that they're not French I suppose).

This morning I was trying to get in to work, it was cold and I really fancied a nice cup of tea (because I'm that rock 'n' roll) and the train was over half an hour late. Then they decided that because it was late they'd stop it before it finished it's advertised route.... Apparently some cock-smoker had jumped in front of a train in London, which is almost a valid excuse, although personally I don't see how it can take half an hour to hose down a train and sweep up a few bits of body.

Anyway, I'm going to stop ranting now, back to my happy place!!! So I'm looking at buying a new laptop, and I've decided to finally take the plunge into the unknown and buy a Mac. Expect a few posts about how that goes sometime in the not-too-distant future....

So, that's basically the 100th post over and done with.

How to destroy unwanted (or wanted) documents

I discovered a new way of destroying office documents today. Forget shredding, I actually made a certificate completely disappear! How? Simple really. Take one laminator, turn up to the hottest setting it has, and feed a document in to the front. Twenty seconds or so later, you have no document. Seriously, the certificate went in the front and nothing came out of the back, it just got smaller and smaller.

It was quite interesting to watch, although the fact it was my only copy of the certificate made it somewhat less amusing than it should have been. Mind you, the people who ran the course will probably laugh their arses off when they see my email requesting a new one on the basis I melted the original.

There is of course one drawback with this method of document destruction – you get through laminators in no time….

[EDIT]

Since I posted this I've managed to have the laminator dismantled and the document retrieved - the laminator is ok but the certificate is somewhat crinkly. I'd upload a photo but the upload's not working - I've probably broken the proxy server now. Ever had one of those days? I'm off down the pub....

Sky high

There was a thing on the news earlier about this glass-bottomed walkway thing the Americans have stuck on the edge of the Grand Canyon. I know the Grand Canyon is one of the seven natural wonders of the world but a glass-bottomed walkway 1,200 metres above nothing? Fuck that! I'm sure the view's amazing but you would not get me on that thing for love nor money.

Obviously I'm a big wuss but I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who couldn't give a shit about looking straight down at over a click of nothing, so I give it a day or two before someone starts charging tourists twenty bucks to walk the loop with their camcorder....

I'm back!

It’s been ages since I posted anything, and for that, I’m sorry. It’s been a busy old time recently, what with week long piss-ups (erm, I mean week long training courses), and gigs and all manner of other shit.

Talking of gigs, Metallica are coming up – tickets on sale tomorrow morning! Seeing as I missed out on seeing Metallica for free last time they were in London I’m going to be doing everything I can to get my grubby little mitts on tickets for this show, especially as it’s at Wembley Arena. Is it just me that thinks the new stadium looks like a giant bear trap? I certainly wouldn’t want to meet the bear that’s for sure…..

Anyway, normal service will be resumed very shortly.

Yes, I am a geek

My boss gave me a new task yesterday - spec out the kit I want for my new workstation, Obviously being a professional sort of chap I enquired about my budget, the reply being "don't worry too much, but obviously within reason". So, effectively as long as I don't start requesting liquid-nitrogen-cooled quad core processors and the like I've pretty much got free reign.

To put this in to context, that's like putting a kid in the Haribo factory and telling them "You can eat as much as you like, as long as you're not sick in the starmix".

I've checked the Alienware site, but I'm not sure I can get away with £3,500 PC's. Especially as I want two. So far, I've specified two desktop PCs with at least a Gig of RAM, decent processors, four flat screen monitors (two for each machine) and the necessary graphics cards, keyboard splitters etc.

I'm expecting my IT department to begin laughing any moment now......

Spoons

There's a bix box of spoons in the kitchen at work, and because it's on top of the microwave and I'm too lazy to move the box I tend to have to reach up and rummage through the box to get a spoon to stir my tea. It struck me today, it's like the worst tombola ever. You have won..... A SPOON! A cheap plastic spoon at that.

Jesus I need to get out more.....

Queues

I don't know what it is but I seem to have an uncanny knack for being able to choose exactly the wrong queue in the supermarket. It happened today, I chose the shortest queue and got stuck behind some stupid bint who wanted to check the prices on half her shopping, kept changing her mind about what she wanted and spent five minutes trying to work out whether all her packets of Twix' had the same number of bars in them. Seriously, what's all that about?

The thing is, it's not like this happens once every now and then, it's every time I'm in a shop - I either end up behind the bastard who decides to pay in pennies, or I get the till operator who's obviously been doing the job since about five minutes before I got there, or they need a price check on a grape.

The thing is the 'scan it yourself' lane is just as bad - I start scanning my items with a smug 'this is easy this, any mug could do it' look on my face and without fail I scan something, the screen displays a message saying I'm a fuckwit and a big red light on a pole starts flashing to make absolutely sure everyone within twenty feet of me can see I can't cope with scanning a few groceries. I then have to wait for a member of staff to come and bail me out, during which time I could have gone through a normal till.

I did consider doing my grocery shoping online, but that's a different story. Supermarkets? Arsemarkets more like. Meh!

Toe nails and God

I'm sure it's obvious from a quick scan through my previous posts that I often think about things that really aren't desrving of that much time, and, inevitably, I've been at it again. I've been considering why it is that finger nails grow so much more quickly than toe nails. I seem to be forever cutting my finger nails in order to ensure I don't end up with talons that would make an eagle owl jealous, but toe nails just seem to say 'Meh, we'll grow later, we're busy doing secret toe nail things'.

The thing is (and this is where you'll think I've totally lost the plot but bear with me), whilst pondering the differences in finger and toe nails, I realised that this discrepancy in growth rates can be used to finally prove the non-existence of God.

Seriously, think about it logically for a second. Scientists would argue the discrepancy is due to evolution, probably something to do with needing long claws on your hands to attack prey whilst needing shorter claws on your feet so you can run away when you (a small baboon for example) attack a larger predator (say, a hippopotamus). Your local vicar on the other hand will argue evolution doesn't exist and that we were all created by God. Now, I'm fairly certain that when creating man God wouldn't have thought 'I know, for shits and giggles I'm going to make finger nails grow four times as fast as toe nails', it's just not the sort of thing that would cross your mind is it?

Therefore, my hypothesis is that evolution must be the cause, and as evolution doesn't leave room for the whole creationist argument, God can't exist, Q.E.D.

Of course, this is just a theory, it may be God was in a jesting mood the day he decided on growth rates for nails, hair and teeth.

Paranoia

Where I work the gents are just along from reception, and recently I've started to experience a weird paranoia. I've started to wonder whether the receptionists notice how long people are in the loo, and whether they sit there wondering just why someone was in there for 12 minutes....

Do they notice when people come out looking slightly pale after a particularly troublesome forest, for instance? Receptionists know everyone and everything, and I wouldn't be suprised if our receptionists know the ins and, more specifically, the outs, of peoples erm, business.

I really do need to stop worrying about things like this, maybe it's finally time to go support the freeing of those whales that are trapped under the ice. Oh hang on, that was 1988.

Getting older

I'm feeling old today. Normally I feel old because lots of my friends are loads younger than me, but today it's because it's half eight in the evening and my hangover still hasn't cleared.

I seem to remember when I was younger hangovers could be cleared with a couple of tablets but these days even a combination of fruit smoothies, tablets, bacon sandwiches and lying very still doesn't seem to work...

The worst thing is that, being old, my brain stops functioning too (except the bit that generates paranoia) so even simple tasks like making dinner suddenly become complex feats way beyond my grasp. As for writing a blog post, that's all but impossible. Which is why this post sucks. I'm off to drink strawberry milkshake and lie very still.

Wishing Tree

I'll never tire of knocking Michael Jackson... :o)

TV really has taken a dive

Taken from today's TV listing:

19:30 - Grow your own Veg

Carol Klein explores root vegetables before embarking on a parsnip safari.

Now, unless 'explores toot vegetables' is a euphemism for something which shouldn't be on TV before the watershed, I can't even begin to comprehend why this show was ever commissioned. Is anyone that dull that they would watch this? Also, what the hell is a parsnip safari? I'm assuming this is where you see parsnips in their natural environment (so looking at parsnips in a field then) as opposed to in a zoo (the supermarket).

Surely anyone can find something better to do with half an hour of their lives?

Conspiracy?

According to the news, most of Manhattan currently smells of natural gas. The authorities reckon there's no gas leak, which means it must be something else.

Being America, there's only one thing it can be. The US government has released a special mind-control drug across the borough, and is going to turn the inhabitants of Manhattan in to killer automotons, who are going to be used to invade middle-eastern countries as part of the 'War to get control of oil' (a.k.a. the war on terror). You wait and see....

2007 - Chinese year of the cack

Well, a new year has begun, and with it comes a fresh lack of inspiration / writers block / apathy. I'm sure it'll pass though, it normally does... The whole thing may be due to MySpace slowly taking over my life - a friend of mine tempted me over to the dark side and, I hate to admit it, I'm now hooked. I can't quite place my finger on what it is but it's got something.... Rest assured though my blog will be remaining here for two very good reasons:

1. I can blog from the train / couch / brothel via my phone with Blogger
2. The blogging feature on MySpace is cack

Which reminds me, I've decided that the word 'cack' isn't used as much as it should be any more. If you're struggling for an easy new years resolution, why not endeavour to use 'cack' at least once a day?

Merry Chrimbles

The Christmas season is now well and truly upon us, the shops are packed with twats who won't get out of my damn way, I can't be bothered to do any work and there are little puddles of sick in high streets all over the country!

Don't expect many posts over the next few weeks as I'm pretty much drunk from now until the New Year...

Merry Pissedmass everyone!

Baker Street

It had to happen sooner or later, and finally the time has come - a post all about taking the difficult brown instead of the easy pink... "You aint seen nothing yet" by Bachman Turner Overdrive was on the radio this morning and once again I was struck by the funny feeling it was about more than just meeting a lovely young lady. Having just taken a closer look at the lyrics I'm now convinced I'm right. Consider:

I met a devil woman
She took my heart away
She said, I've had it comin' to me
But I wanted it that way
I say that any love is good lovin'
So I took what I could get
mmh, mmh, mmh
She looked at me with her big brown eyes
And said,
You ain't seen nothin' yet
B-B-B-Baby,
you just ain't seen n-n-n-nothin' yet
Here's something that you're never gonna forget
B-B-B-Baby,
you just ain't seen n-n-n-nothin' yet
And you're thinkin' you ain't been around,
that's right

If you take the parts I've highlighted in bold and singularise the plural of eyes, I think I make a very strong case. Discuss at will.

Wii mongs

According to the Metro this morning some people are having trouble with the controller for the Nintendo Wii - apparently they're throwing it across the room when they try to serve in a tennis game. There's a simple solution to the problem - don't sell game consoles to mongs!

Stupid stupid people

In one of the free London rags tonight there's a story about an ambulance crew who followed their satnav to Manchester instead of London and didn't notice their mistake. For fucks sake, how do you possibly not realise something's wrong when a thirty minute journey suddenly takes eight hours?

Worse than that though, some dippy tart managed to get on a dual carriageway by following her satnav but on the wrong side of the road, which let's face it makes her fucking stupid. The fact she got two thirds of the way to London driving down the fast lane the wrong way? That's just plain scary. Seriously, people that stupid shouldn't be allowed to walk around town without a helper.

Hello? Hello? Yeah I'm on a plane! Nah, it's rubbish!

As everyone already knows, mobile (cell) phones are banned on pretty much every flight due to safety concerns (the crash of Crossair flight LX498 was attributed to mobile phone usage). The thing I've been wondering though, is what service provider are people that can get reception at 35,000 feet with?

Seriously, if Orange can't even get a signal to my local pub, how the hell can anyone get a signal six and a half miles up, in a metal container travelling at nearly 600MPH?

I'm planning on flying to the States in the new year so I may try an experiment. If you see a plane crash caused by a mobile phone on Sky News, chances are my experiment failed....

Badger badger badger badger....

The Zutons - liars!

I've decided The Zutons are liars. Please see Exhibit A below:

Exhibit A - lyrics from 'Valerie'

CHORUS:

Cos since I've come on home,
Well my body's been a mess
And I've missed your ginger hair
And the way you like to dress
Won't you come on over
Stop making a fool out of me
Why won't you come on over Valerie?

Look again at the third line - "I've missed your ginger hair". Hmmm, seems unlikely to me....

(Note to those people reading this of the ginga persuasion - I'm joking, please don't kill me)

Taking the peas

Why is it that the peas in any pot-based noodle snack, be it a Pot Noodle, Super-Noodles to go or whatever, never seem to go soft? Everything else in the pot can turn to a gloopy mushy mess but the peas just sit there being crunchy, the gits!

Surely science has reached a point where we can work out how to get dehydrated peas to rehydrate properly? I mean, back in 1969 we had the technology to fake a moon landing, so why is something as easy as making peas soft so bloody difficult?

Photos of US and A

I've uploaded a few photos from the trip to NYC - more will be going up when I get my film developed but here's a few for now. Please, you look. Niiiice!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/morals/

Trainspotting

I've always thought trainspotting is a particularly crap hobby. Apart from the standing around in a cagoule with a thermos, it can't be that hard. Go to any station and you're bound to see loads of the badgers.

No sleep in Brooklyn (well, Manhattan Island anyway)

They call NYC the city that never sleeps, and there's a bloody good reason for that. It's not because there's always somewhere open to do something, although this does seem to be true. No, it's because of the fact the every driver in the city is constantly honking the car / passenger / rickshaw / cyclist / NYPD patrol car / air in front of them.

New York is just crazy when it comes to traffic; I'd never seen a taxi wedged under a truck until a few days ago in Times Square. The fact that no-one seems to give a monkeys about red lights, pedestrians crossing the road, turning right from the fourth lane on the left on a red light or getting out of the way of fire engines doesn't really help, and that combined with the temperament of your average New Yorker is just a nightmare.

New Yorkers aren't as bad as they're sometimes portrayed. Yes, they are all in a hurry all the time, and yes, some of them can be slightly abrupt (in the case of the staff employed on the Subway just downright bloody rude), but when they try they can be genuinely nice people. Of course they're nicer to you if you tip them, something that soon becomes a pain in the arse if you're not used to it. Oh, you've served me at the bar; you'll need a tip then. You've driven me five blocks in your cab, tip for you sir. Cleaned my hotel room? Well, you are the bloody cleaner but no no, of course, a tip for you too. I don't have a problem with tipping people like waitresses if they've given good service or whatever, but seriously, tipping a barman for serving you a beer? Americans are crazy...

Speaking of crazy Americans, I saw some crazy dudes whilst I was in New York. My favourite has to be the guy on home-made roller skates barrelling through Central Park wearing a Santa hat. I liked the randomness of that one

No sleep 'til Brooklyn

Well nearly, there's a few days to go until I go to New York but not many! As such this is likely to be my last post until I get back unless I have a flash of inspiration at the pub tomorrow or at Heathrow. Rest assured when I get back though I'll have plenty to write about, after all the Americans are even more crazy than the English. Hell, they're nearly as crazy as the Dutch!

You may remember a while back I wrote a post about people having sex with animals. Well, it seems that some people have taken this to whole new levels. Popbitch today reported about a man in the states who was caught having sex with his wifes Labrador. That had been dead for three or four days. Now, how desperate must you be to actually do that? I can't imagine it's an impulse thing because any normal person wouldn't keep a dead dog around for four days, so the guy obviously thought "my wife's rubbish, I know, I'll keep the dogs corpse for a few days and then have my wicked way".

How bad would you feel if you were the wife?

A sort of blog update thing

Just a quick update around the blog really. You've probably noticed some small changes to the way the blog looks, just a few tweaks around the lists on the right and some colour changes mainly.

The really sharp ones of you out there may have noticed that the times of the blog changes have a), switched to 24HR format, and b), all gone up the swanny.

The reason for the times being up the spout is that after a year or so of blogging I've realised yuo can change the time zone you live in within the blogger settings. So I did, and it's retrospectively changed all the previous post times. Which I hadn't expected.

You may also notice the font size of the posts increases slightly from now on. There's a very good reason for that, too. I've set up email blogging so I can blog directly from my phone, which is great as I can post as and when the mood takes me. However, I've yet to figure out how to control font size when posting that way, and to be honest the text is quite small anyway (well, it is on my screen but I am running at a crazy resolution).

Anyway, please continue to read, talk about and generally promote the blog, I reckon I could be very nearly at a readership figure somewhere in double figures! Cock-on!

Mushrooms

Everybody knows that you can eat some mushrooms while others will kill you, or make you think you can fly. I'd have hated to be the poor bastard whose job it was to work out which was which.

"Here you go Joe, try this one"
"Gaaaak"

I bet the money's good though.

Evil twin

I've been thinking for a while that there's something missing in my life and I think I've finally worked out what it is. I need an evil twin. I reckon it would be really cool (I mean who could forget the evil Michael Knight from Knight Rider - awesome!).

Evil Hoff

Obviously my evil twin will have to look exactly like me, except with a little triangular goatee. He'll need a suitable name befitting an evil twin, something like 'Jason' or 'Ramone' maybe...

My Flickr account

I've set up a Flickr account so anyone who's interested can see photo's I've taken and uploaded. The account's linked to my mobile so I can upload pics in real time if something truly awesome happens, so keep an eye out for some really random photos very soon (certainly expect photos from New York!).

Here's the link so add it to your favourites...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/morals

Go go Ninja Dinosaur

Go to this website, buy the album. XFM played "The monkeys are breaking out of the zoo" the other morning and it's wicked. (I should point out it's all for charity (won't someone please think of the children?!)).

Apathy

Meh.

A buh-? No not a buh, a bomb!

I'm off to New York in a few weeks, and obviously there are still quite a few security measures in place to ensure no-one tries to hijack the plane with a plastic spork or go wild with a tube of toothpaste ("Tower this is Captain Johnson, we have an emergency up here - we're all minty fresh and free of gum disease!").

I'm assuming people are still fairly jumpy too, so I will be trying as hard as I can not to say any of the following during the trip:

• "I'm so excited I could explode!"
• "Now where did I leave my suitcase?"
• "A one way ticket please - I won't be coming back. Ever."
• "I will kill the infidel scum!"
• "What are you going to do with your 72 virgins?"

I wonder if they'll let me post to my blog from prison?

Kids say the funniest things

It's a well known fact that kids say funny things, it's what they're for (that and fetching another lager from the fridge when you're watching the telly). Normally the things they come out with are fairly innocuous, but occasionally they come out with an absolute gem.

My favourite ever comment I've heard leave a child's mouth was in the pub, when the son of a regular turned around to the barmaid and said "bloody hell, you've got massive tits". I don't think I've ever laughed so much in my life.

Janet Street Porter

Why? What possible purpose does she serve? Answers in the comments please...

Plane stupid

Easyjet have had a bright idea - they're currently trying to sort out their planes so that you can use your mobile during a flight.

Couple of things: firstly, that means that either Easyjet have magic planes that stay up in the air with skyhooks, or all that stuff about mobiles causing planes' instruments to go wrong is bollocks. I don't think Easyjet have magic planes.

Secondly, they think this is a reason to travel with them. Really? So I can fly to somewhere nice and sunny and spend the flight in relative peace (assuming someone's stowed any children in the hold), or I can spend the flight listening to some ignorant toss-bag bellowing in to his phone...? Sign me up for tickets on the second flight. The thing is too that although this is maybe bearable on a short hop to Amsterdam, once Easyjet start doing this the other airlines are going to follow suit. Who's up for an 8 hour flight to New York with everyone using their phones?

Expect instances of air rage to increase in the next couple of years....

Ick, ick and thrice ick

I don't often worry about the state of the world but this week there have been three somewhat disturbing news stories which just make me think there's something very wrong with people.

The first one that caught my eye was about a man who, having been banned from every field in Britain after he was caught having sex with a horse called Molly, was caught hanging around stables in the early hours.

Then comes the story of the three 20 year old guys in the US who saw a picture of a girl who died in a motorcycle accident and, having decided she was pretty, went and tried to dig her up so they could have sex with her. They even bought condoms (I'm assuming they wanted to ensure the corpse didn't get pregnant and give birth to little dead zombie babies).

Then there's the story of the man who covered himself in olive oil, rolled around in a load of oats and then got horses to lick him clean. Just no! No no no!!

All of these stories have been reported in the press and can be found online with a quick search of Google news, so I'm not making this shit up. I mean, what is wrong with these freaks? What makes someone think "I know, I'm going to go and fuck a horse this morning"?

Anyone?

1 year old

I've just realised my blog is a year old - how the hell I've managed to keep enough interest to actually write this shit, let alone keep a regular reader base is beyond me. Anyway, thanks to everyone who reads this drivel, here's to another year!

Petrol stations and fire probably don't mix

I was at the petrol station yesterday and noticed something a little worrying. As far as I could tell, the only firefighting equipment available should soemthing catch alight were two small fire extinguishers and a bucket of sand. Now, call me odd if you like, but if I was in a petrol station which was on fire, and I had a choice between having it away on my toes or standing there and attempting to tackle the blaze with a small fire extinguisher and a bucket of sand I know which I'd be doing.

Modern technology

Modern technology's great sometimes isn't it. The screenshot below is real by the way, I haven't doctored it in any way.

The bastard Frosties advert and bloody kid are driving me nuts....

It's stuck in my head,
it's stuck in my head,
I really wish that little fucker was dead,
maybe killed in his bed,
with an axe to the head,
or strapped to the back of an out of control bobsled,
I wish he was dead,
I wish he was dead,
I wish he was deeeeeeead
Frosties, they're sheeeeeite!

Caps lock - a pain in the arse

Has anyone else ever noticed just how stupid the placement of the Caps Lock key is on your standard Qwerty keyboard? It's right above the shift and below the Tab key, which is possibly the most inconvenient place anyone could possibly have put it. How many times during your working day do you find yourself deleting a few lines of text because it's all in upper case?

I'm fairly certain that whoever designed the keyboards put it there for a reason, and I'm fairly convinced the reason is that they were the anti-Christ.

I'm all for ripping the sodding thing out of my keybOARD AND THROWING IT IN THE BIN. oH, BUGGER!

Don't label Chavs

According to the Metro today Chavs have taken to wearing the price labels on clothes they wear. Apparently, it serves a number of purposes, although there is a slight flaw in the chavvy logic – see if you can spot it.

Apparently, the first purpose of wearing a large cardboard tag on a bit of string is so that people can see how much your Reebok tracksuit and baseball cap cost, and the second is so that it looks like you nicked it.

Actually there are two flaws. Firstly, is anyone really going to be impressed you can afford a pair of £20 tracky bottoms, and secondly, if it’s supposed to make it look like you stole the stuff in the first place, surely it doesn’t matter how much they cost if you want people to think you can’t afford it anyway.

I’m really hoping that loads of Chavs gets arrested for shoplifting in Bluewater as they walk around with price labels on their clothes. If I see it happen, I’ll video it and post it on Youtube.

Bash for cash

You may have seen in the news recently that shortly Channel Four will be having what it refers to as 'wank week'. As part of 'wank week', Channel Four will be televising a group masturbation session which is being held in London for charity.

Basically this event involves lots of people turning up at a hall, making a small donation for charity, and maybe going for the endurance world record (currently somewhere in the region of eight and a half hours).

There are to be three rooms according to one report I read, one for men, one for ladies, and a unisex room. So that'll be one room full of ladies, and two rooms full of blokes then.

It's the cleaners I feel sorry for. "Brenda! We need more mops!"

Flower power

Ok, I'm somewhat confused. I saw an advert recently for flower scented tampons. I'd have loved to have been in that meeting:

"Stu, how do we get more people buying OUR brand of sanitary product?"
"I know, let's make them smell of flowers, because people often comment on how tampons don't smell of flowers"
"Fantastic, I'll get on to marketting stat."

Of course, they may have discussed scents first...

"Vanilla?"
"No"
"Strawberries?"
"Hmm, maybe, what else you got?"
"Fish?"
"Hell no!"
"Burning wood?"
"Nice, like that. Anything else?"
"Flowers!"
"Flowers?"
"Flowers."
"Flowers it is...."

Samuel L. God

According to weekly email Popbitch, Samuel L Jackson is going to be the voice of God in a new audio version of the bible.

No joke, SLJ is going to be voicing God. I can imagine it now:

Noah, fetch two of every animal and put them in a big motherfucking boat. Except sharks, don't get any sharks. Oh, and while you're there, get me a big kahuna burger and a Sprite.

Genius.

Beerkegikstan (Part Two)

I've been doing some research (nothing particularly in depth, just a few searches on Google and Wikipedia), and it seems I'm able to have my own flag (although the chances are it won't be recognised as an 'official' flag), so that's good.

Unfortunately the legality of claiming an island as my own is slightly more cloudy. There was a guy who discovered an island after a glacier moved which he claimed as his and wrote to the Norwegian goverment and the UN to claim independence, but Norway reckon it's theirs (a treaty signed in the 1920's says any land in that area of sea is theirs, although the bloke says it doesn't count as the islands wasn't discovered then).

Alex Harvey on his Island ('Nymark')

So I'm giong to have to be a bit sneaky, and claim an island on the sly. I'm hoping to find an island that meets my needs, quietly sit there for ten years and then claim it as my own under squatters rights.

I can use the ten years to design my flag.

Beerkegikistan

There’s a thing on telly at the moment about islands being created by volcanic eruptions in the sea. Which got me thinking, there must be loads of little islands out there which aren’t owned by anyone, so why not go and claim one for myself and have my own country?

I guess some countries might try and claim they already own all those little islands out there on some sort of technicality, but I reckon if you just went and found one, stuck a flag in it and set up shop, you could probably get away with it, especially if it’s a small place tucked out the way.

Obviously you’d want somewhere with a decent location (near the equator is probably preferable to somewhere near a polar ice cap) so you could get a decent tourist trade going, and you’d need somewhere big enough to fit a hotel, a pub, and a 24 hour shop, maybe somewhere about the size of the Isle of Wight, but I’m sure if you looked hard enough you’d find one.

It wouldn’t be all fun and games obviously. For a start, you’d be King, which requires at least a little work. You’d have to have some laws I suppose, like no alcohol to under 16’s, making beards illegal, that sort of thing, and you’d probably have to go around waving at people occasionally and having Tony Blair over for a game of Ker-Plunk, but I’m sure you’d still have ample time for enjoying your island.

Obviously you’d also need a token army, maybe a few kids with AK-47’s and a bloke in a dinghy with a potato gun – nothing particularly threatening but just enough to let other countries know you’re prepared to fight if they get too close.

All I need now is a map, and a flag.

Meatballs

I bought a tin of meatballs the other day, which is hardly interesting I admit. The thing is, when I got them home I noticed the label said “Meatballs in ‘tasty’ tomato sauce”. Hmm, now why did the manufacturers feel the need to put the word tasty in inverted commas? It hardly inspires confidence in the product now does it? Still, it could have been worse; it could have been the word ‘tomato’ in inverted commas. Or ‘meatballs’.

In memoriam Bruno

You may have seen in the news recently that a bear has been roaming the German countryside after crossing the border from Austria. He’s been wandering around the woods and towns, presumably trying to get tickets for the World Cup finals. He’s also been responsible for the deaths of a number of sheep and chickens, as well as the destruction of a bee hive. Oh, and he squashed a Guinea Pig.

Bruno

Obviously you have to feel for the Guinea Pig, but in the general scheme of things Bruno’s crimes weren’t particularly heinous. Unfortunately for Bruno however, the powers that be decided to get a load of hunters to track him down, and they’ve shot him. With bullets. The first thing that springs to mind is the question “why didn’t they tranquilise him and move him to a rodent-free zone?”, but unfortunately the German authorities decided death was the answer.

So what have we learnt? If you’re a bear, in Germany, don’t kill Guinea Pigs and eat bee hives, or they’ll shoot you. Schwinehunds.

Oh, and the second lesson we’ve learnt is if you want to get rid of a pesky, furry rodent, get a bear.

Spoons

Someone I used to know once hypothesised that everyone looks like Pete Townshend when they look at themselves in the back of a spoon. He was right too.

Everyone looks like Pete in the back of a spoon

Question or nominate?

The managers of the call center I provide analysis for have put up a box which members of staff can drop questions in to, the idea being said managers will then answer any questions and post them on a board. There was one fatal mistake made with this though - it's never been specified that the questions should be work related, and of course, there's always one smart-arse who will take any opportunity to take the piss. Me.

I've already left my first question in the box, namely 'What is the capital of Peru?' (I thought I'd start them off with an easy one), but I'm moving it up a notch from here on in. A few of the questions I've already thought of are:

1. How many roads must a man walk down?
2. Are white socks ever excusable?
3. If Billy has 2 plums and a banana, and Wendy has a cherry, and Billy gives Wendy his banana, what has Wendy got?
4. Who would win in a fight - Superman or He-Man?

I'm looking forward to seeing what answers they come up with for those. In case you're not sure of the answers, they are as follows:

1. 42
2. Hell no
3. Crabs
4. He-Man obviously. He's got Battlecat and a fucking huge sword

He-Man and Battlecat - rock hard!

Holes

The Beatles once sang about knowing how many holes it would take to fill the Albert Hall. Complete nonsense one might think, after all, a hole is, well, a hole. But I've been thinking about this and I think I know how to calculate the number of holes required. I'm sure the theory will require a bit of tweaking at the pub, but I'm fairly certain the principles are sound.

Firstly, we can all agree that you can't fill a physical space with holes, that's just common sense. However, I'm thinking antiholes. Antiholes, being the opposite of holes, would logically take up a physical space.

In order to make antiholes I propose accelerating normal holes to colossal speeds and then have them collide with each other - this would create antiholes. If we can ascertain how much volume the antiholes created by a standard sized hole (for example a hole five inches across and five inches deep) have, and we knew the volume of the Albert Hall, we could logically sumise the number of holes needed to fill the Albert Hall.

Go on, tell me I'm wrong.

Devil's crisp

My brother found a McCoy that looks like the sign of the devil, so I thought I'd share it...

Art isn't dull

My kid brother has created a site to display his portfolio of artwork - worth visiting, expecially if you're an employer looking for a graphic artist...

Visit here: http://www.fotolog.com/pmurrillsart

Bear Vs Monkey

There was a story in the press this week about a monkey in a zoo that got eaten by three bears. Now, my first thought was, what was the monkey doing going to visit the bears in the first place, it’s his own fault, but, it transpires that the monkeys and bears were kept in the same enclosure. Admittedly they’ve lived harmoniously for a good few years and until now there haven’t been any eatings, although I suspect the monkeys, being the cheeky scamps they are, probably have played a few tricks on the bears, like hiding their iPods, stuff like that. However, I do have to wonder, didn’t anybody ever think ‘Hmm, bears and monkeys, that could be interesting if the bears get stroppy’?

I would have thought just that, but I’d have still put the monkeys in with the bears and called it some sort of socio-biological experiment. And filmed it all to sell to Channel Four.

Oh, and I also learnt today that seahorses hoover shrimp up through their noses. Everyday’s a school day.

Eurovision

Ah, once again Eurovision has arrived. I’m not quite sure what it is about Eurovision, everybody knows it’s complete cack and yet everybody seems to watch it. I’m not sure whether it’s the complete nonsense that Terry Wogan comes out with (this year he’s excelled himself), the Finnish metal bands with giant bat wings, masks and fireworks, or maybe it’s the whole thing of sitting there and ripping the shit out of all the entries, which is a very British past time (remember the Blaine-baiters down by Ken’s office?) but it sort of sucks you in, and before you know it you’ve watched two hours of God-awful noise instead of turning over and watching QI or Friends.

13 weeks of living hell (Part two)

I decided to watch the opening night so I could give you my opinion on the housemates:

• Bonnie – Chav retard, ya get me?
• Pete – Has Tourettes.
• George – Posh cúnt, who kills foxes with dogs for fun.
• Shahbaz – Camp Scottish 80’s throwback.
• Lea – Plastic slút.
• Imogen – Hmmm, looks quite nice actually. Welsh.
• Mikey – Arrogant, Scouse, sexist fuckwit.
• Dawn – Miserable Brummie cow.
• Glyn – Weird, puny lifeguard with delusions of grandeur. Welsh.
• Richard – Big gay Al except more camp. Cúnt.
• Grace – Posh, spoilt, naïve, cute.
• Lisa – Gobby, Manc, proper fúcking annoying. About as far from ‘mint’ as you can get.
• Sezer – Waaaaaaaaaaanker. Recognise.
• Nikki – Gold digging, vacuous slut. I’d shag her, but only after I’d hid my wallet. Will be the first to get her títs out.
  
  The things I do for this blog, I just watched an hour of this shit. I’ve never been so bored (except when I watched Titanic, but at least that had a happy ending (if you haven’t seen it the big boat sinks and Leo gets a lungful of water)).
  
  So to summarise, a couple of fit birds who look a million times better than the plastic slút who’s spent £35K on tits and lips, a load of arrogant posh tossers and a bloke with Tourettes. Oh, and some people who are Welsh.
  
  I pledge, here and now, not to watch a minute more of this arse.

13 weeks of living hell (Part one)

Big Brother returns to our screens tonight, and it’s running for a somewhat excessive thirteen weeks. Thirteen weeks! That’s over three months! Now, I’m not being funny, but do the people at Channel Four really think people are going to want to watch a group of nobodies doing pointless tasks for over a quarter of a year? The sad thing is, people probably will. Every day!

I really can’t understand what the attraction is, it’s not like anything ever happens. Oh, and it’s not just Big Brother, there’s Big Brother’s Little Brother, Big Brothers Big Mouth, and don’t forget the non-stop live coverage on E4.

So, basically you’ve got hundreds of thousands of people who aren’t going to spend their summer enjoying the sunshine and sitting in the beer garden on a balmy night, oh no – they’ll be sat at home watching people eating dinner and sleeping. That’s another thing, the 24 hour coverage – what’s the point, THEY’RE ALL F*CKING ASLEEP!!! People really will watch anything...

I suppose there is one good point though. At least for thirteen weeks we’ll know exactly when Dermot O’Leary is on telly, so we can avoid him.

How Jedi are you?

how jedi are you? :: by lawrie malen

I actually always thought I was more like Yoda (small and shrivelled)....

It's a fish

I sometimes wonder about those phone in competitions you get on telly, you know the sort of thing:

Which of these is an animal with four legs?

A) A dog
B) A fish

Obviously they're designed to be very easy on the basis more people are likely to call in (the logic there is somewhat flawed anyway but I won't get in to that now), but I do sometimes wonder if there are people out there who call up and then get the answer wrong. The law of averages says that at least 1 or 2 people out of the thousands of callers should get one wrong, but by the same token if enough monkeys called up a fairly high percentage would probably get the answer right too.

I'm not suggesting of course that monkeys do call up TV quiz lines (I'm sure they're not that interested in winning an HD camcorder or a Ford Focus), but I'd be interested to do an experiment to see who fared better: Monkeys, Students or Northeners. My money is on the monkeys.

Snot

Obscure post alert (just to make a change!) - I'm just trying to work out why you can't have an operation to remove whatever it is in your nose that generates snot. I mean. In this day and age you can have your eyes fixed with lasers (the lasers in Star Trek can't do that I bet), you can fake a moon landing (hell, the Yanks did that in 1969) and you can buy pens that are also clocks, so surely you can remove a couple of totally useless things in someone' nose?

Just think about this for a second. No more runny noses, no sneezing over strangers on the tube, no more having to discreetly wipe bogeys on the underside of chairs, it'd be brilliant. I even have a plan to keep Kleenex in business - it's called the Holly Valance channel.

Something else I've just thought of - why do pilots refer to enemey fighters as 'bogeys'? The only thing I can think of is that years ago a pilot sneezed on his radar and thought the bogeys on the screen were planes. Well go on then, YOU come up with a better suggestion.

Eight days a week

I've been house-sitting for the last couple of weeks, which basically meant free broadband, free Sky+ and the chance to get out of work early (as opposed to waiting around for a lift). Unfortunately I'm not house sitting nay more, which means my evenings are about to becp,e far shorter again.

In order to increase the amount of time I spend away from the office I'm thinking we need a third day at the weekend, something to put off Monday for another 24 hours.

I'm sure with some thought it could be done - there may be some degree of fiddling with calendars required and it may cause confusion for animals that hibernate or don't have calendars (such as otters, who famously don't have calendars in their little otter houses) but I reckon it'll be do-able.

I'll have a think. Hmm, maybe decimalisation is the way forward....

General ramblings

It's been some time since I last posted, which I put down to excessive tiredness caused through working too hard and not being able to get a decent nights sleep due to having the coldest bedroom in the country. Luckily a friend has gone to the States for a holiday so I've got a nice warm house to kip in, so I can finally sleep.

It's strange how much a lack of sleep can affect you. You'll be sitting in the office, pretending to work and suddenly get hit by a big wall of tiredness, and the next thing you know you're shaking from too much caffiene and snapping at anyone who so much as looks at you. Admittedly it can be quite amusing watching people jump as you shout at them for daring to approach you during your lunch break but even that small pleasure gets boring fairly quickly.

That's a point, why is it that you can be sat at your desk with a burger, chips, a pack of crisps, a can of coke and people still come up to your desk and say "oh, are you at lunch?" - it's crazy. I feel like twatting them around the head with something, maybe a wet fish or a baguette perhaps, and shouting at them. The worst thing though is that, once you've explained that yes, you are at lunch and you're not eating all that food as a light snack, they still ask you to do stuff. I'm going to write the dictionary definition of "lunch break" on my white board and refer people to it from now on...

Oh bollocks, I've just realised I missed the sodding rugby. Damn it!

I've just checked the score, glad I missed it now

Anyway, I think that's enough random rambling bollocks for today. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

How much??

As I write this I’m in my room at the Marriott hotel in Leeds, killing ten minutes before I inevitably decide to go and sit in the bar and have a nice cold pint. There’s a box on my desk that I can plug my laptop in to in order to access the internet at broadband speed.

I thought this was marvellous, just plug an Ethernet cable in to the PC and the box and surf away, all will be grand. Until I decided to log on that is. In order to use the service you have to pay a charge, which I was prepared for. What I wasn’t prepared for was the fact that the minimum amount of time you can buy is 24 hours, which costs £15.

I’ll be posting this entry to my blog when I get back to the office.

Harpoons for recreational purposes

Ever had one of those days where you just want to buy a harpoon and shoot people? Today was one of those days, so I decided to see just how easy it would be to get me a harpoon…..

It’s actually fairly easy. After a quick search for harpoons using Google I realised what I actually needed to pin people to walls was a spear gun. A quick search later and I’d found a supplier of spear guns offering some fearsome looking weaponry for less than £200.

I saw a lovely model (shown above) which was 1.2m long and looked like it could take down a whale. I’m looking forward to seeing the face of the guy who works in the post room downstairs when it gets delivered to my office.

Cat and Chips

First off, a quick update. You may remember I mentioned in an earlier post the large cat that’s apparently been spotted in the local area. For the last few weeks there’s been a debate raging in the local rag as to whether it exists or not (really, some people have nothing better to do – you’re reading this aren’t you?) and in this weeks edition they’ve printed a photo of the thing. Hopefully now people will accept there’s a fucking big cat roaming the area, but somehow I suspect the debate will continue for some time to come.

Right, that’s beast watch over. Let’s move on to something else that’s been in the news this week, albeit on a different scale, chip and PIN cards. According to one national newspaper the country is about to be thrown in to a state of confusion as shops start to insist on shoppers using their PIN instead of signing for their purchases. The paper in confusion actually said, and I kid you not, that the introduction of PINs has caused an “information overload”, and that because of this people can’t remember their codes. Now, I’m not being funny here, but I fail to see how having to remember a four digit number (which in a lot of cases is the same as the code these people use at the cash point) is information overload. Maybe peoples’ brains are getting smaller. I shall find out and report on my findings in a future post.

The worst thing (as far as I can see) about chip and PIN cards is that I’ll now be forced to listen to an increased number of morons asking me for my “PIN number”. Do people not know that PIN is an acronym for Personal Identification NUMBER? It’s a PIN, or at a push a PI number (which could lead to confusion unless your PIN happens to be 3.142).

A chilled beer

Some dude in east Asia (I think it was Japan but I can’t swear to that) has invented a self-cooling drinks can. Let that filter through your brain for a second. Chilled beer, anywhere, with no need for a fridge. Open can, wait 15 seconds, drink cold beer. Festivals will never be the same again, parties will be bereft of the usual arguments between man and woman about what fridges are supposed to hold, and you won’t have to suffer two warm cans when you get back from the supermarket with a new slab. It’s like somebody has invented Heaven and worked out how sell it in off licences.

The best thing is it costs all of about 1 cent more per can to produce than a standard can, so it’s not as if it’s unfeasible either.

I don’t know who the bloke who invented this marvellous device is, but he deserves a hug. Or possibly a Nobel Prize.

Valentine's Day

Meh! I hate Valentine's day, it's the most pointleess day of the year. I did do better than I predicted I would though. Here's the total:

Cards 0
Emails 1
Texts 1

Who says romance is dead?

Swamp thing

I’ve thought of something I’d like to add to my list of stuff to do before I die (I’ve changed it slightly from a list of things I want to do before I’m 30) – I want to go speeding through the Everglades on a swamp boat with a stereo blasting out the theme tune for ‘Gentle Ben’. I don’t know why, it just strikes me as something funny to do.

Online forms

I’m writing this entry from my death bed. I’ve got some sort of disease which makes me ache all over, has given me a headache and is making my nose generate untold amounts of gunk. I’m informed by a female friend that I have a cold, but there’s no way that can be true. At the very least I’ve got flu, although I suspect it’s bubonic plague, or maybe pneumonic plague, I never can remember which is which.

(Microsoft Word has just informed me that the ‘it’s’ in the previous sentence is grammatically incorrect and should be an ‘its’ – hmmm, I think not, I think I know how to construct a coherent sentence thank you very much).

Damn, I’ve (or should that be Ive) forgotten what the topic of this entry was meant to be now. Oh yeah, online forms.

We’ve all filled in online forms, and if it’s for something worthwhile the chances are you’ll be asked for your occupation, and given a long list of professions to choose from. Generally you get options such as IT professional, office worker, banker etc. Usually there’s nothing that resembles my actual job so I tend to choose something generic that sounds about right. I got thinking though, if I’m struggling to choose an occupation, what happens to people who have a really specific job. For example, I’ve never seen an option for Prime Minister. What the hell is Tony supposed to do?

Does he choose civil servant and think “that’s close enough” or does he think “I run the bloody country, the least I can do is boast about it a little”? After all, he may be the Prime Minister but he still needs car insurance and an Amex card…

I really do need to get out more…

The Brain

The brain’s a strange beast. Well, it’s not technically a beast, it’s more an organ, but you know where I’m coming from. But anyway, it’s weird the sort of things it remembers. For example, I know that at any point in time 0.7% of the worlds’ population are drunk, or that if you look at your reflection in the back of a spoon you will see Pete Townsend looking back at you. (It’s true, if you don’t believe me, go fetch a spoon). However, I can’t remember the capital of Vietnam, which is probably a far more useful thing to know (in as much as that I’ve never been asked what percentage of the worlds population are drunk right now, but I have been asked what the capital of Vietnam is).

I’m assuming that it’s not just my brain that does this, and that there are millions of people out there who can name all the different species of head lice, but don’t know the name of the plane that carried the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. So therefore, there must be a market for some sort of brain training school where you can learn to forget useless facts and remember useful ones instead. As there’s a market, I’m assuming it has therefore already been done. However, I won’t be going. Personally I don’t care what the capital of Vietnam is, but I do care that donkeys sink in quicksand but mules don’t.

Can you smell weed?

I read a story in the local paper today about a suspected cannabis factory that had burnt down in the area. Police found plants and weed-growing paraphernalia at the house once the fire had been put out so it’s a fair bet that the place was being used to grow puff. To be honest though, I’m surprised the police needed to find any evidence to know what had been going on in the house. I’d have thought the smell of all that burning weed and half the neighbourhood walking around eating mars bars would have given the game away….

Weird noises

I was just about to start this post off with something incredibly witty but I’ve been thrown by the somewhat disturbing screeching coming from outside my window. I’m assuming a fox was killing something, perhaps the wild cat I mentioned in an earlier post. It’s stopped now, but I’ve totally lost my train of thought, and it’s time for Invasion.

Rant update

I found out today that the release date for the P990i is May 2006. That’s five months away. I can only think of the following reasons for such a long delay:

• There’s an inherent problem with the handset that needs fixing
• Sony Ericsson are waiting for more network providers to roll out 3G services
• Sony Ericsson are bastards and are making people wait for shits and giggles
  

I think it’s the last one. After all, if I made those sort of decisions I’d do it.

A quick rant

It’s time for a rant. This one’s directed at Sony Ericsson, in particular their mobile phone division. It’s not that they don’t make great phones, because they do, it’s more the fact that they make great phones that I can’t buy because the one I want still doesn’t have a release date.

The model in question is the P990i, a truly brilliant little smart phone with every feature you could possibly ask for, and a few extra ones too. I’m not going to turn this in to an advert but suffice to say, it’s a neat little gadget and I want one. I was going to buy the previous model, but it got discontinued the day before I went to buy it. I didn’t think this was too much of a problem, as I expected SE to release the next model quickly. That was nearly two months ago and I’m still waiting to find out when the new phone’s going to be released, let alone how much it’s likely to cost.

Maybe I’m missing something here but I really can’t see what thought processes were behind the decision to discontinue the phone before the new model was ready. The only thing that’s stopping me from going and buying a phone from a different manufacturer is that as far as I can tell the P990i is the only phone that does everything I want the way I want, and I do like SE phones a lot. Oh, and because Motorola’s phones feature a strange quirk in the software that means they switch to their loud profiles when you charge them. Oh, and I have a thing about not owning a Nokia, not that they make bad phones (I’ve had two) but because they seem to be a bit, ahem, “Chavvy”.

Oh my God, I’ve turned in to a phone snob.

Big cat diary

One of the local papers this week has a story about a guy who was out walking his dog and saw a wild cat of some type. The article says that the man in question estimates that the cat was about a foot high and a foot and a half long, and that he thought it might have been a Lynx. All well and good.

The article then goes on to quote a bloke who’s part of the big cat society, who says (and I quote) “This sighting could be that of a Lynx or bobcat….however, Lynxes are about four feet long and this man says the animal he saw was less than half this length”.

So, that’s that then, it can’t possibly have been a Lynx. An expert says so. Now, I’m no expert in big cats (insert your own joke here if you wish) but I’m willing to bet that Lynxes aren’t born fully grown (if they are then fair play to female Lynxes, that must smart somewhat). Maybe I’m missing something, but surely the bloke walking his dog just might have seen a young Lynx as opposed to a fully grown one.

I’m therefore going to put forward the notion that the bloke is a moron and shouldn’t be considered an expert in anything, partly because he’s obviously stupid and partly because I like the idea of ‘The beast of Bexley’ roaming around, possibly hunting stray animals and ramblers.

Headline news

I perhaps shouldn’t make light of bird flu, especially if the press is to be believed and we’re heading for a pandemic, but I couldn’t help but smile the other day when Sky News showed the headline “Bird Flu in Turkey”. I always preferred chicken anyway…

I’m fairly sure there must be people who work for various news agencies who purposefully try to slip amusing headlines in to serious news programmes (getting a pun in to a tabloid rag doesn’t count). I applaud the scamp, again from Sky News, who put a caption on the screen in front of George W. Bush during the hurricane in New Orleans – “Bush: Worst ever disaster to hit United States” – sheer genius. You can’t tell me that was an accident.

I’m sure there are plenty of situations out there that lend themselves to this type of japery. I can imagine a story in a local paper about a new weight watchers club with the headline “New faces all round at Weight Watchers”. If you’ve got any more feel free to add them as comments.

Spam, spam, spam and spam.....

I’ve had an idea. I’m going to create a service that allows people to sign up for spam. Most people hate spam; I’m indifferent as I don’t actually get any in the Email accounts I use, only in my hotmail account which never gets looked at anyway, but I’m willing to bet there are people out there who actually like getting spam Emails.

I’m guessing these are fairly lonely people who don’t get many normal Email messages, and find the feeling of receiving an Email, even an unsolicited one offering Viagra or perhaps the chance to win a holiday, nice. It probably makes them feel wanted.

Therefore, I’ll allow these individuals to log on to my site, register their email address and I’ll then sell the addresses to all the spammers I can find, who can then send junk to my visitors to their hearts content.

I will of course need to ensure that people can’t just sign their friends or enemies up on their behalf, so I’ll obviously send an email out to any registered addresses with a confirmation link (although I’ll assume that delivery is as good as confirmation in order to speed things up slightly).

Just in case anyone’s beaten me to this, and is thinking of signing me up in an ironic sort of way, my email address is: bill.gates@microsoft.com

Oh, and in case that seems vindictive, I’ve just spent the last two and a half hours rebuilding my laptop after Windows decided it didn’t want to recognise my hard disk any more (funnily enough the first time I powered up after running a defrag). Coincidence? Maybe, but I’m blaming Bill

A new year, a new post

It’s been a long time since my last post, and since then Christmas and the New Year have been and gone. I’ve learnt a few things over the festive period:

• TV schedules actually can get worse than normal
• Vodka not giving you a hangover is a myth
• Drinking 7 pints before the office Christmas boat party isn’t the best of ideas
• Family guy is hilarious
• Nicotine patches hurt when you take them off
  

Talking of nicotine patches, I noticed something in the little leaflet that comes in the box:

“The nicotine [in the patch] is sufficient to relieve the unpleasant withdrawal symptoms such as restlessness, irritability, headaches, inability to concentrate, light headedness or dizziness”.

All well and good, you may think. That is if course, until you reach the part about the side effects of using the patches, which may include:

“Headache, dizziness, impaired concentration, anxiety, irritability”

So if I’ve got this right, the majority of the side effects are the same as the withdrawal symptoms you get from quitting smoking. Hmmm, and I paid about £30 for two weeks worth of these things...

It’s nearly as stupid as the system for getting cash out of the ATM using an American Express card. Apparently, if you decide to use your AMEX card to draw cash, the amount isn’t added to the balance of your AMEX account, oh no. Instead, the amount comes straight out of your current account. Oh, and you get charged for it. Seems to me like it’s just as easy, and somewhat cheaper, to use the card your bank provide you for making ATM withdrawals.

So long, farewell..... but only until next year

Well that time is upon me, where I get to leave the office and not come back for more than 2 days. I'm therefore unlikely to be near a 'net connection, unless I decide to take advantage of wi-fi connectivity in my local pub.

That being the case I won't be posting anything here until 2006, although the chances are that I'll still be writing and I'll post anything I do write upon my return.

See you in 2006!

Scams

I’m listening to a story about a woman who fell for a scam in which she was told she’d won the Spanish lottery, and then had to shell out a load of cash in order to claim her winnings. I kind of feel sorry for the woman – I think she’s stupid, but I can kind of understand how she got suckered.

However, there are people out there who fall for the so-called ‘419 scams’, where people receive letters from people asking for British folk to help transfer money out of Africa due to various reasons which all equate to one thing – money laundering. The people who fall for these scams are not only stupid, but they’ve got absolutely no reason to feel aggrieved – after all, they’re greedy idiots who have agreed to perform an illegal activity in order to make some cash.

Many hundreds of people fall for these scams every year, ergo there must be many hundreds of greedy, stupid people out there who can be taken advantage of. Which gives me an idea...

I’m not going to scam people, or try and con them, I’m simply going to ask them to send me their money. The way I see it, asking people to send me the money they would have lost to criminal gangs helps both parties. I get rich, and they don’t have to suffer the ignominy of losing their money to a con artist. Oh, and also the money won’t get used to fund drug trafficking or prostitution, it’ll be used to buy gadgets, cigarettes, beer and a Pagani Zonda F. You may think this will never work, but there’s no accounting for people’s stupidity.

Things to do before I'm 30

I’m 28 in three days. This means I have 2 years and two days to do all the things I want to do before I’m thirty. Admittedly I haven’t actually sat down and put a list together of the things I want to do, so maybe that’s the first step.

Hmm, actually, it’s not as easy as you think, I mean, really, what am I going to do of any note in the next two years? So far the only thing I have on my list of things I want to do in the next two years and two days is ‘twins’, and I have a feeling that that’s something that will be down to chance, luck and a lot of alcohol.

I could add things like hang gliding, badger baiting and skydiving, but unless I actually get off my arse and make an effort to do these things they’re really not going to happen, and, if I’m honest, I’m not going to. So, here’s my realistic list:

Give up smoking
Learn to drive
Visit Australia
Take up smoking again

I know it’s only a short list, but once you take in to account the time I spend at work, asleep, in the pub and waiting for trains, that only leaves me a short amount of time to do the things on my list. Oh, and if the twins thing happens, that’ll give me even less time.

Look - a Moose!

I’m struggling to think of anything to write today. It’s been so long since my last post you’d think I’d have pages worth of material stored in my somewhat strange brain. Let’s face it, there’s so much happening at the moment – the government is telling us that we need to teach kids to read by telling them how letters sound (no, really) whilst at the same time telling us that it’s ok to carry up to seven grams of cocaine because you can class that as a personal stash (no, really). Also, a survey has just been completed that says one in ten men have paid for sex sometime in their lives (try ten in ten, find me one man who’s managed to get a woman in to bed without buying them a drink, dinner or paying for a cab and I’ll be impressed). Oh, and apparently truffles taste like romping in a field, according to the host of the cookery program that’s on in the background at the moment.

One very random thing I learnt today is that (apparently) it is illegal in Alaska to look at a moose from an aeroplane or other flying vehicle. I’ve always been a fan of these sorts of crazy laws, and I’m always tempted to test them. For example, if you did look at a moose from a plane in Alaska, would the local constabulary be waiting for you with some nice steel bracelets on the runway? Would the case get to court? Would the judge convict? Obviously if I was the judge I’d send the or bastard up on the charge straight to jail for a few months and then laugh about it afterwards down the pub, but I’m obviously not completely sane.

I believe there’s an equally strange law in the UK that says you’re allowed to shoot Scotsmen on Clapham Common as long as you use a long-bow. Now this one is really quite interesting. On the one hand, you’ve committed murder, which is very illegal, but on the other hand, by law, you were perfectly entitled to do so. I’m willing to bet my laptop that if you tried to get away with that one you’d get sent straight down, unless the judge was a Scot-hating duffer with a few loose screws, or me.

In case you’re wondering at this point why I found out that it’s illegal to look at a moose from a plane in Alaska, I was actually trying to find the shortest distance between Russia and America. I couldn’t remember the distance in miles (it’s something crazy like eight) but ended up getting sidetracked, which is quite common for me.

I also discovered recently that Microsoft have found a new way to cause system administrators headaches. They’ve launched a web-based version of Messenger, which is useful in as much as the IT department at work haven’t yet worked out I can use it (mind you, they also haven’t cottoned on the fact that there’s generally a USB hard disk sitting on my desk), but it’s sure to open up all sorts of security holes before long. If you happen to read about a large British bank being compromised by online instant messaging software, the chances are I’ll be involved in some way (and posting about it from a computer in the dole office).

Snakebite

I’ve just seen a story about a guy who was out in the desert in America shooting various innocent animals. He shot a rattlesnake, and then decided to cut the snakes head off. Once he’d done this he then went to pick up the snakes head and noticed it was still trying to bite him. Pretty cool huh?

It gets better though. The bloke managed to get himself bitten by the snakes head, and ended up losing a finger because of it. I say fair play to the snake. There he was, minding his own business out in the sunshine; some bloke shoots him and then chops his head off, so the snake gets its revenge by biting the bastard.

The ironic bit? The bloke lost his trigger finger.

Inspiration, or lack thereof

I’m struggling to find some inspiration at the moment. Writing a blog may look like a very simple thing to do, but finding a topic that other people are likely to want to read about can be more tricky than the Times “Fiendish” Su Doku (I WILL finish yesterdays one at some point).

After all, the different types of sediment found in Britain’s canals may be something you feel very passionately about, but the chances of anyone else caring in the slightest are slim. The chances that the two other people on the planet who do care actually find and read your blog are slightly less than the odds of Eminem becoming the next U.S. President.

Actually, Eminem may be a better option than George W. Bush, who, let’s face it, is a moron. I’m not sure how someone who is such good evidence that humans are related to baboons actually became president of the world’s largest superpower, but if memory serves it had something to do with chads and vote rigging. Allegedly (I can’t afford lawyers as expensive as George can).

So anyway, where was I before I disappeared along that rather obscure train of thought? Ah, yes, inspiration. I still haven’t had any, so I’m going to give up and watch Bill and Ted’s excellent adventure. Strange things are afoot at the circle K.

Christmas shopping

I make it about six and a half weeks until Christmas, which is scary because I’ve only just realised that and I haven’t even thought about Christmas shopping. I love Christmas, what with the family gatherings, parties and that sort of thing, but I hate Christmas shopping. Actually, hate isn’t strong enough a word, maybe loathe would be better.

I find shopping a stressful experience at the best of times, and the extra crowds in the run up to Christmas fill me with a sense of dread. Over the years I’ve managed to make the experience slightly less stressful by limiting my shopping to one shop for all the presents – Boots 3 for 2 has been a lifesaver for me – but I still seem to spend hours walking around the same few aisles trying to find suitable gifts.

This year things are going to be different. This year, I’m doing all my Christmas shopping online. This seems to me to be a cunning way of avoiding all the things I hate, nay, loathe, about the Christmas shopping experience, whilst still allowing me to purchase suitable gifts for my friends and family.

I hope everyone wants stuff from eBay...

The worst advert in the world...ever!

I’ve just been subjected to possibly the worst advertisement I’ve ever seen – two animated sheep (I think they were sheep anyway) singing a bastardised version of “Push it” by Salt ‘n’ Peppa. This already sounds pretty bad, but when you consider that they were singing about not putting salt or fat in food you can maybe start to appreciate just how terrible this advert was.

What gets me is that some advertising company thinks that people are going to see this sort of bilge and think it’s funny, cool, ironic maybe? The only thing people are going to think when they see adverts like these is “that was shit”, or possibly “I now refuse to shop at the Co-op as a matter of principle”. I for one thought both.

What's on TV?

People talk of Britain becoming a nanny state, and although this may be true to some extent, I never realised how bad it was until I saw that Channel 5 had given ‘Flubber’ a G for guidance rating. I mean, this is a film aimed at primary school kids – surely it can’t be that bad, can it?

Something I’ve noticed recently is the huge number of “Top 100 greatest ever…” type TV shows that seem to be appearing at the moment. I’ve noticed at least three different ones over the last two days, and I don’t even have satellite. Be it the greatest ever adverts, documentaries, music videos, whatever, they all follow the exact same format – a few D-List celebs get wheeled in to talk about the clips, whilst Graham Norton or Jimmy Carr make the odd quip before and after the ad breaks. Surely we’ve had enough of these now, haven’t we, or do we have to wait until we see the Top 100 greatest ever Top 100 greatest ever shows?

So, back to ‘Flubber’ – so far I’ve not noticed anything particularly worthy of a guidance rating. I’m only watching it to see whether the rating is justified of course.

Jamie Oliver, the fat-tongued mockney, is currently cropping up in virtually every advert break, peddling Sainsbury’s products for Christmas. Somebody please shoot me, and quickly.

I’ve decided – ‘Flubber’ gets a C rating, for crap.

Gunpowder, treason and plot

As I write this the sky is alive with fireworks, which is fine, except they’re making it difficult to hear the Eddie Izzard DVD I’m trying to watch. It’s funny though, that we celebrate what was basically an attempted act of terrorism, albeit 400 years ago. In case you don’t know, Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators were trying to blow up the then parliament in order to remove the protestant ruling class and stop the persecution of Catholics in England at the time. Unfortunately for them though somebody grassed them up, and the plan was thwarted at the 11th hour.

It seems strange, as after all, should somebody try to blow up parliament today they’d be locked up in an MI5 interrogation room for a few months before being sentenced to several hundred years of making sure they didn’t drop the soap. We certainly wouldn’t decide to name a day of the year after them and celebrate their antics.

Pointless advertising

I've realised my last entry was a bit diary-like, something I'd been hoping to avoid in all honesty, so for that I apologise. Normal service will now be resumed....

So anyway, I'm watching TV the other night and during one of the ad breaks there was a Phillips advert for one of their MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanners. In case you don't know, MRI scanners are huge machines used in hospitals to scan people for leprechauns (or something along those lines). Anyway, the point is they're huge machines costing many thousands of pounds. So, what's the point of advertising them in the middle of Brainiac? How many people are honestly sitting at home, see an advert for one of these things and think "You know, I must rush out and buy a new MRI scanner"? What demographic are Phillips aiming for here? To me it just seems like a huge waste of time and money. Ok, so maybe it increases peoples awareness of the brand but to be totally honest, showing off a 60" plasma TV would probably work just as well...

Here's a thought - why don't Phillips donate the money they have spent on these totally pointless adverts to a hospital, or just give them a scanner?

The trip

The trip to France had to be cancelled due to my friend injuring himself and rendering himself incapable of riding the bike, so instead we decided to travel the UK and have a few drinks instead.

On day one we left London around lunch time and headed for Doncaster, and after dropping our stuff at the hotel and having a quick bite to eat we headed in to Doncaster. We started of in Yates’ but although it was cheap it was also empty, so after a quick pint we headed off in search of a livelier venue.

We stumbled across a wetherspoons and decided on a couple of pints in there, but, being a wetherspoons there was no atmosphere so we again headed off in search of fun. We wandered in to a club called Berlins, and discovered it was 99p a pint night, so we decided to stay there for the duration. Many many drinks later we apparently took a cab back to the hotel….

On day 2 we managed to crawl out of bed in time for breakfast, and after a quick trip to Asda to buy some essentials (crisps and coke) we headed off for our next destination, Blackpool.


After arriving in Blackpool and locating a suitably cheap B&B we headed out on the town for the second night of drinking (actually, if you take in to account the nights we were drinking at home it was about the fifth night drinking) and started off the night in the Walkabout, which was home to some very good looking ladies. After a few pints, a little letching and a lot of mullet spotting, we decided to head down the sea front, where we stumbled upon Manchesters, somewhere we’d been before on a stag do. Unfortunately the Manchester was worse than it sounds, with dodgy covers of bad songs and a lot of chavs. Queue a very quick pint and a quick exit.

Next stop was another Yates’, where we stayed until closing time due to the fact we couldn’t be bothered to walk any further. After that, it was a quick cab ride back to the B&B, where we sat drinking with the owner until 2.30 in the morning.

After another early rise for breakfast on day three, we again jumped in the car and headed towards Manchester (the place, not the pub). We were staying at a friends’ girlfriends flat, but we arrived in time for a quick mosey around the Trafford centre. After an altercation over seats between my friend and a group of ten year old girls, we headed out for a rather posh dinner in Wilmslow, and of course a few more drinks.

The following morning, after returning to the Trafford centre due to having return a DVD box set that had been supplied without DVDs, we headed home, and of course, once we’d dropped our stuff off we headed for the pub.

All in all, it was a heavy but fun week and certainly made a change from being at work. Roll on next time!