Here comes the summer

British Summer Time starts tomorrow. I'm still waiting for the British summer of 2007 to show up, so I don't hold out much hope of us getting one in 2008.

We lose an hour's sleep tonight when time jumps magically from 2 to 3am without us evening noticing. Of course, I'll notice tomorrow morning when I'm tired as a bugger when I wake up, even more sleep deprived than I am already.

I woke early today because of builders clanking and banging as they removed the roof from a neighbouring property... at 7.30. Cunts.

So that was me, in a BAD MOOD.

What should you do when you're in a bad mood? Something nice? Curl up in your PJs and watch films in bed all day?

That might have been nice. Instead, for some totally fucked up mental aberration, I decided that we should go to the Trafford Centre - on a very rainy, cold Saturday afternoon. It took 20 minutes to find a parking space, let's just leave it at that.


Eye-eye!

The main reason for putting us through the Trafford Torture was to check out an opticians. Breaking my specs the other week was the catalyst for this - I'm due a sight test in June anyway, so I figured I might as well.

I don't like having my eyes tested. I dislike any experience that involves me being in extremely close proximity with a virtual stranger, especially youthful, attractive women with low-cut blouses and full cleavages. I found "looking down to the right", very difficult as this directed my gaze right into her puppies. "Looking down to the right" ended up being "looking down to the right, up, down, left, anywhere but her cleavage!".

Jeez.

So, having got my breath back, I had to go through the whole "is number one or two clearer", "is it better with or without" rigmarole. By the time they've switched to the alternative lens, I can never remember which is better to tell you the truth, they might as well be testing the eyesight of a goldfish.

Anyway, it turns out that I'm blind and I need new specs. Bloody expensive things.

The Orphanage

We're off to a late showing of The Orphanage in a bit. I'm scared already.

On safari

For some reason, I subscribe to geeky e-mail alerts from ZDNet. Today's included somebody extolling the virtues of Apple's Safari web browser for Windows. Now, despite my loathing of everything Apple, Mac and the like, I'm all for making my web browsing experience faster and more pleasurable, so I downloaded and installed Safari to check it out.

Yes, it's fast.

No, it isn't nice to look at; the text looks all blurry and the menus are difficult to read. See:

So I'll be sticking with Firefox.


Safari... so goody!
A BBC film crew has managed to film tigers in India by sticking remote controlled cameras to the trunks of specially-trained elephants.

Check out the article and some clips here.

Bloody marvellous.


Welcome to the jungle

The BBC news website's Have your say section provides a forum for contributors to share their opinions about topical news items. There are certain rules to posting comments and most threads are moderated, meaning the all comments must be read and authorised prior to being loaded onto the relevant topic page. Such moderation means that comments get stacked while they're awaiting moderation and it kind of defeats the object of having an open debate.

Anyway, I've recently had two comments rejected outright! I'm shocked and appalled. How can somebody as reasonable as myself have their opinions dismissed outright by some humourless lefty shitbag fucktard? Total cunts.

Here are the offending comments.

DEBATE:

Is the new car-share lane a good thing?

SENT:

20-Mar-2008 10:21

COMMENT:

We could use an unemployed person to be our passenger and then get them to wash our cars while we're working? If only they could get out bed before midday.

Another New Labour Cupid Stunt.

COMMENT STATUS:

Rejected

DEBATE:

Do you struggle to contain your anger?

SENT:

25-Mar-2008 12:20

COMMENT:

You know, anger often comes from strings of minor unresolved annoyances that build up to an explosive level.

You know what else? Having fully moderated subjects on HYS where none the posts ever get published and there's a huge moderation queue? That's one of those little things that can set you on the way to getting INCANDESCENT WITH RAGE!

If you can't review the comments, don't have full moderation!

COMMENT STATUS:

Rejected

What's wrong with those? Fucking morons. Did you know that the BBC only advertises its vacancies in the Guardian? Yes, so it deliberately only targets people who read that lefty pile of shite. It's no wonder their forum moderators won't allow anybody to put over a point of view that's reflective of what most people in the country think.

Arsewipes.

New things

I've bought some new things; it has to be done at times, especially when retail therapy serves you better than any little blue pill or therapy session. So, what has Sniffy been throwing her money at?

Well, her love of espresso drew her to one of these:

But she didn't have over £300, so she got one of these for £40 instead:

This is a De Longhi EC11. It does two cups of espresso at a time, really nice espresso, which is all I could ask for. It even does steam to heat and froth milk for latte lightweights. Fantastico.


In Heals yesterday, we happened up their kitchen section, where we came across these:

Available in three sizes, the Typhoon Capsule storage jars are lovely and reasonably priced. Another advantage is the aesthetic pleasure of them not having writing on them that tells you what's supposed to go in the jar. You know the sort of thing; pastel-shaded tins with "coffee", "sugar", "flour", etc written on them. These things are not quite as bad as crockery that instructs you to drink "coffee" from a certain mug, or eat "pasta" from a particular dish, (I've even seen crockery emblazoned with "plate", "dish", "mug", etc) but they're in the same league - "things with writing on them" - or "stuff for when you get alzheimers", which is perhaps more appropriate.

Of course with the example above, you could get quite confused and try to eat your cornflakes out of a coffee mug, but you get the picture.

Anyway, back to the Typhoon storage jars. They're quite nice, but one of the ones we bought was a bit duff and the lid didn't quite fit properly. Then while struggling with it, I sliced my thumb on the sharp edge. So now, instead of being emblazoned with "flour", that particular jar is smeared with my blood.

The piece de resistance in terms of purchases is a new gadget - a diddy camera, to add to my collection of photographic equipment. I got one of these:

It's OK. The main feature I was after with this acquisition was dinkiness for less than £150. I'd have liked a Canon, but when I buy Canons, I always get quite high-spec ones and they're pretty expensive.

So, adding up the outgoings from recent shopping expeditions, including a Tesco visit on Thursday night and Sainsbury's on Friday, the total comes to:

Coffee machine - £40
Tesco shopping - £130
Storage jars - £30
Camera - £140
Book - £12
Total - £352

Which equals a Francis Francis X1 coffee maker.

So you see, you can often save yourself a lot of money by going for one big purchase to satisfy that part of your brain that benefits from getting new things, rather than forgoing that and buying lots of little things in its place.

"I really love you"

"Show me!"

How much does Mick Hucknall look like the result of a terrible genetic experiment that has inserted some of Mickey Rooney's DNA into the embryo of a pig, super-aged the progeny (in conjunction with hourly ego massage) then stuffed it with botox.

Every morning this week, Radio 2 have been playing a trailer for a Simply Red concert that they're broadcasting on Sunday. So each morning, I've heard the voice of a supposedly sexy woman sighing "I really love you", followed by Mick Hucknall's "Show me!" from the start of Something got me started. Imagine having the Rooneypig trying to seduce you. Martine McCutcheon did and she threw up in his dreadlocks.



Why do they do it?
I bought a sandwich for my lunch today. I had to go for turkey and bacon club; all the others either had onion on them, or they had halal meat on them, which really fucking pisses me off. Anyway, I opened my turkey and bacon club, prized out one of the sandwiches and it pulled a chunk of soggy bread from the other half:

You see, they can't help but put bloody tomatoes on sandwiches...

Look at how much they use too:

The golden rule about tomatoes, lettuce or cucumber on a sandwich is, unless it's to be eaten within half an hour, DON'T FUCKING DO IT! Especially if you then go on to cram it into a plastic sandwich container so the sogginess seeps into the bread and it all squashes together, it taints the flavour of everything and makes it all hideous. And that's even before all the bloody mayonnaise and butter they spread on there by the tub full.

On the halal subject, I really object to the assumption that non-muslims are OK eating it; I don't really like the idea of normal butchery, but I really object to halal and kosher butchery, it's very cruel. I also object to religious superstition being imposed on what I eat (not mentioning the hot cross buns that I bought this evening), and I'd rather it wasn't.

So, Lyle and Shaw sandwich makers, your sarnies are not that bad, but please, please, please: quit it with the hocus pocus halal meat, soggy salad veg, margarine and mayonnaise!

My fingernails are too long. Bloody things.

Happy Turpy Turpy Top o' Da Mornin' Day Te Ye!

Apart from my usual "oh fuck off " at the thought of everybody on the planet celebrating St Patrick's day today, I have the added pleasure of announcing that they're all wrong. We knew that anyway, but because it's Holy Week this week, all celebrations of Saints' Days have been cancelled. So, if you're pathetic enough to celebrate St Patrick's Day, and you haven't done it already, then you're too late and you'll have to wait until next year to inflict your nonsense on the rest of us.

Turpy turpy my arse.



I'm sat here, waiting for the missus to get home and I can actually hear the questions on The Weakest Link from next door's telly. At least the squealing baby on the other side has finally stopped wailing after not giving up all bloody night. I'm going to phone our estate agents and tell them to use these things as selling features.



Lay-zurrrr
Having mentioned losing the cushion from my specs the other day, I had a couple of helpful suggestions:

"Your optician will fix another on for free"

"Get your eyes lasered"

Imagine having laser beams for eyes.... or TASER BEAMS FOR EYES! My goodness, I'd be so happy.

Raymi the Minx feels the same...

Humanity

I don't know why I was ever deluded enough to think that I hadn't completely lost my faith in humanity. I spent years being bitter at the world, hateful of people, despairing of mankind's attitude to his brothers and sisters, and the general lack of respect for the planet.

Then I took some pills for a while and then it all seemed OK, or at least they made it possible to accept the rubbish world we live in.

Seven years on and I've woken up again. And I know that I'm right to really dislike people. If you were to be asked whether you think the world would be a better place if a virus came along and wiped out every human on the planet, if you were really honest, the answer would have to be yes.

It's not just the damage to the environment, the wars, genocide, poverty, pestilence, greed that in makes humans bottom of the pile of nice things on the planet (below spiders, creepy crawlies and cottage cheese), it's the way people have no respect for one another.

What's brought this on? Has Sniffy read of another outrage in Darfur? Religious hatred elsewhere? A man-made disaster somewhere else? No, nothing so big in magnitude. No, it's just another occasion of somebody making an appointment to come and view this here house that we're trying to sell and them not bothering to turn up, not bothering to cancel, just not showing up.

So what? Well, it's nothing to them, nothing to anybody else, nothing really in the big scheme of things. But when you rush home from work to get the house sorted for the visit, delay preparing your evening meal because they've made the appointment for 7pm, when you do them the courtesy of taking the excitable dog out for a walk in the pouring rain so he's out of the way while they're supposed to be viewing the property, well that's a big fucking deal.

I hate them.

I hate them all.

Rocky hates them too because he's always made to go wandering the streets while we're having viewings. Sometimes he doesn't want to. Especially when it's pissing it down like it was tonight.

I have come to the conclusion that people who want to live in this part of Manchester are fucking idiots. They can't read, they can't figure out a room's dimensions from the figures. "Oh, this second bedroom is a bit small, I was hoping to fit myself, my wife, our five kids, and their grandparents here."

From now on, I'm going to name and shame any fucker who makes an appointment to view the house but doesn't bother to turn up.

Khan, Hussain, Jackson. I'm sure the list of shame will grow much longer before this house finally shifts.


Discomfort
The little plastic bit that cushions my specs on the bridge of my nose has fallen off. This is making wearing my glasses rather uncomfortable. This means that my allocated retail therapy funds will have to go on specs - a medical necessity - instead of an espresso machine (also a medical necessity, but not quite as necessary as something that will enable me to see).

Why can't I just see? People with good eyesight have no idea how lucky they are. My eyes aren't that bad, but it's just that thing of not being able to when I wake up. Imagine how good it must be to open your eyes in the morning and everything be clear.

Hey ho.


Delia
I'm watching Delia's How to cook on the Food Channel she's shown three different methods of preparing pig swill so far. Courgette, feta and something else somethings. Blimey. It's got egg in it too.

Chop her hands off and kick her in the fanny!

That's the Saudi punishment for any woman found driving over there - or something not quite so severe, like forty lashes and being forced to wear a barbed wire bra for a month.

So, look at this defiant little minx. This is Wajeha Huwaider, who was filmed driving round Riyadh in protest at the Kingdom's ban on women driving - no burka either. Tut tut tut.

No idea what she's saying; she could be talking about the price of eggs at Asda for all we know.


Slated
I happened to come across US current affairs website slate.com by accident, but I'm so glad I did. Not only does it contain up to date commentary on a number of US and international news items, it provides reviews, media news, health, etc, it's also a repository for a number of photo essays from the Magnum Photo group. Wonderful. And generally in black and white. Perhaps that's where I'm going wrong with my attempts to be artistic.


Wii Olympics
I was having a conversation with colleagues while I was in London yesterday. Of course, London will be enjoying its Olympiad from this autumn and it seemed topical to bring the Olympics into our chat.

While postulating about possible exhibition sports in the London games, and any sports that might bring a few gongs to the Great Britain team. Tiddly winks was obviously high up there, bingo, greyhound racing and jellied eel pie eating were other possibilities. Then we had our moment of genius: Wii sports and Wii Olympics! Why the hell not? With internet gaming, we could simply have the whole Olympics online and so not have the bother of messing about with all that London rubbish. It'd save a whole lot of money for everybody in the UK and imagine what it'd do for reducing our carbon footprint!

So, come on Ken. You're the one who's bullying motorists at every opportunity, introducing tax after tax in the name of reducing the impact on the environment. Why not make a proper gesture and scrap the Olympics in favour of something not so utterly pointless and wasteful?


Doing my bit
Of course, I did my bit while I was down there yesterday. I didn't cotton on at the time, but I don't think my colleague realised that we had a tube ticket for our time there, and I thought she suggested walking to our destination because it was a nice day. It was a nice day when we set off from Euston, it wasn't a nice day by the time we'd crossed the city and walked 4 miles to Imperial College.

View Larger Map

My feet were so sore. It felt like somebody was pushing white hot needles through the tips of my toes into the balls of my feet.

So that was nice.

E-mail is ruining my life

E-mail isn't actually ruining my life; it's a programme I'm watching on the telly at the moment. It's all about people blaming having too many e-mails and it stressing them out at work. Bollocks. If you don't want to be bothered by your work e-mails, check your messages in the morning, shut down Outlook, opening it up at lunchtime, close it down again, and open it up an hour before going home. Anything that doesn't need a response, delete.

If people are desperate to get in touch, they'll phone you.

The people I work with block out days in their diaries to respond to their e-mails. That's like not answering the phone and then listening to your voicemails on a Friday afternoon when nobody's around if you decide to call them back.

But hey, that's work and this is Friday evening. THE WEEKEND!

Me and Rocky will be running wild and free tomorrow as Trump is out working until late afternoon. Rocky is really looking forward to being dragged around in the wind and rain.

Watching the Channel 4 News, there's an article about some nasty arms dealer who has been arrested in Bangkok. There he is, surrounded by Thai commandos who are wearing baseball cap with "COMMANDO" embroidered on them. I'd love a hat with my job title embroidered on it. That would be so cool.


Where the streets are paved with red paint with congestion charge markings
I have to go to London on Monday and I'm not exactly sure where it is that I'm supposed to be going. I'll get off the train at Euston and ask somebody I think. "How do I get to London? I'm from oop north and I can't work out where the coloured railways are - I think I want a turquoise one, where can I find a turquoise train?"

I might need a turquoise train and a blue one, I'm not too sure.

I don't even know why I'm going there, perhaps I'll find out once I arrive.


Crufts
It's Crufts this weekend. I blame two things for Rocky (not including Trump): Spaced and Crufts. Trump first got the idea to get a mini schnauzer after watching Colin in Spaced, this was then fed by watching Crufts last year. They only use the silver ones in TV, they only show the silver ones in dog shows. Of course, some might say that it's institutional racism that keeps the black ones out of the public eye. The truth is the black ones are a bit like the beast in the attic; kept out of view of the public for health and safety reasons.

Think on.

Fanfair

Remember the Montreal Olympics in 1976? I think a lot of people in Montreal do because they're still paying for it today.

Anyhoo, remember Emerson, Lake and Palmers' Fanfair for the Common Man? It came on my MP3 player in the car just now. What a masterpiece! At least for about a third of it, then it goes all prog rock weird and it just goes on and on and on for about ten minutes longer than it should do. There are quite a few songs like that, Led Zeppelin did that too.

They don't half go on, those prog-rock types. I don't know who they're trying to impress, perhaps they just get carried away with the moment, so many moments.


So busy!
I love it when colleagues complain about being so busy that they don't even have time to put out the fires, yet they fill their diaries with about five meetings with the same person each week. In fact, today, I noticed the same three people in conflabs from 9.30 to 10.40am, at which point they came into a team meeting and talked to each other some more. This was followed by further discussions between the three of them from 11.15am to 12.30pm, and again later on in the afternoon. All three are supposed "senior managers" who seem to need to discuss everything at length rather than just getting on with it.

Annoying? Most definitely.

My favourite ploy of theirs is placing the "meeting in progress" post-it on the closed door of their office to prevent people disturbing them.

That's leadership for you.


Gender queer
I'm trying to get my head around the concept of somebody being gender queer. Max in the L Word is gender queer apparently - a lesbian who has transitioned and is now a gay bloke. Trump is much more worldly wise about this sort of thing and, amused at my confusion, she just told me to google it.

What the hell, so long as somebody's happy and harmless, eh?

But the L Word. I don't know whether I'm really enjoying series 5 because I'm getting it about 8 months early and it feels "special", or because it's one of the best ones so far, but it's bloody fantastic!

And the next series of the US Office starts in April too. Telly is my friend again.


Priscilla
Currently watching Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, what a great film. Classic Australian cinema, like so many others of the era. There was a time when you'd see virtually the same cast, in different roles, in everything that appeared in Australian film and TV. It seems to have gone quiet now that all their best actors have gone to Hollywood... or L'Oreal.

They're worth it.


Vista
Now that I have my new laptop, I've been busy getting used to using Vista. It's OK I suppose, with a few "oooh, look at that" bits. I think some commentators have said that it's how XP was supposed to have been. Who knows.


Opera
Why is it that you can't make out what people are singing in opera, no matter what language the thing is written in? And they complain about music these days.