Kiss me in the rain

There's nothing lovelier than being woken by the person who you're mad about, giving you a gentle kiss and a cuddle. At 6.15 on Saturday morning I was woken by my dearest Trump (not trumps), she was saying something to me, but I was listening to the sound of torrential rain.

"Sniff, are you awake?"
"No"
"Did you put the shower on?"
"Eh? No!"

She got out of bed and wandered into the hallway of her parents' house, where we'd been staying for a couple of weeks while they were on holiday. An exclamation of despair and horror preceded her re-emergence in the bedroom.

"Tina, I need you to wake up and put your glasses on NOW!"

Wondering whether they'd give me superhero powers, I put my glasses on and staggered bed-footed, into the hallway...

It was very steamy out there; moisture had condensed on all the walls, it was dripping from the ceilings, pictures and mirrors in the hallway were steamed up. It was a right fucking mess.

We ran it over in our heads: Trump had come to bed at 2.30am after playing Grand Theft Auto; she was delightfully tipsy after a few glasses of wine; we both fell asleep around 3am; the shower was not on at this point.

"Have you ever sleepwalked?", she enquired
"No, never"
"And you're sure the shower wasn't on when I got to bed?"
"Positive"
"But you didn't hear me get up?"
"No, nothing"
"What time did I come to bed, 2.30am? The shower could've been on for about 3 hours! The boiler could be fucked. Imagine the fucking gas bill!"

Worried, amongst other things, that the wallpaper might start to fall off, we opened windows, doors. We started patting down the sodden walls. Our heads and the steam cleared, we explored worst-case scenarios:

• All the wallpaper comes off walls and ceilings
• All the wallpaper comes off walls but not ceilings or vice versa
• 1 or 2 plus the boiler is fucked

Action = claim on house insurance

• The Trump parents find out that Trump was a little tipsy

Action = claim on house insurance and cash in Trump's pension

• The walls and/or ceilings become stained

Action = find matching colour and spend the weekend repainting

• Everything goes back to normal

Action = thank fuck and swear never to do anything like that again

• The gas bill arrives

Action = claim it was unseasonably cold one night during the warmest October on record

It was an odd situation and, looking back, it was something reminiscent of the opening scene of a horror film. Young, attractive couple are woken by the sound of the shower running during the night. One gets up to investigate and is moidered by a deranged murderer who has escaped from the local secure hospital for the criminally insane. The other, helpless in her slippers, soon becomes the second victim in what police later describe as a frenzied attack. And that's one reason why I prefer to wear my shoes while I'm inside the house - just in case somebody breaks in and tries to axe me to death: I'd hate to be barefoot if that ever happened.

I could write stories and shit like that. It doesn't take a genius.


Genius
It doesn't take a genius to work out how to transfer music from vinyl to your PC if you have the right bit of wire and some software. I am victorious!


Shoelace conspiracy
Why do shoelaces always get twisted? It's so annoying. Like the cords on telephones: you forget how annoying this is because you tend to only use mobile or cordless phones, but your work phone is always corded and some dim fuck always manages to twist your cord despite the fact that you're always REALLY careful to leave it untangled. How difficult is it to put a telephone receiver down so that the cord doesn't tangle?


Oh brother!
My brother is a bit strange. I won't add to that because there's so much I could go into and I'd just get be very depressed.

Anyway, he has a PC and he doesn't really know how to use it. As a result, he keeps breaking it and then wonders why it doesn't work quite as well as it should. He keeps asking if I can go round and "sort it out" and I don't really know what this means since he claims to have already reformatted it. He phoned again earlier and asked when I might be able to go round. Mum has just asked "are you going to Alan's then?". Eh????

I can't really be arsed.... so tired. It's like a garage mechanic being asked to sort out somebody's car because it's not driving as they'd like and then finding out that they're driving with the handbrake on.

Better do my sisterly duty I suppose.

Bumholes.

Former British Steel bought for £4.3bn worth of spuds?

Headline news today is that our former British Steel is in a buy out deal with a huge Indian-based company, Tata. It's pronounced "tater", as in potater... that's potato to anybody who still hasn't got what I'm on about...

Ah stuff it, I was out till after midnight last night and my body is still in shock. I really can't cope with doing social things; I'm out tonight and tomorrow night too. I don't understand how people can be bothered going out, especially people on normal salaraies - it's so expensive.


Ha ha ha
Last night's event was some stand-up comedy thing. The tickets were £14, drinks came to £5.70 a round (I insisted on my sister having soda water instead of fizzy mineral water - same bloody stuff) and parking was £6. SIX POUNDS STERLING for parking, thieving bastards. But yes, it was a stand-up comedy thing at it was quite good fun. It amazes me how people can put a routine together, or at least have enough material floating about their head to enable them to stand up and talk coherently and in an entertaining way. Some people are very good at it, very natural.

My sister said she "wouldn't get on that stage for a 20 minute routine even if they paid me half a million!". I retorted that "I bloody would". And then it was pointed out to me that I'd have to make people laugh too.

This "make 'em laugh" attribute is obviously an art and the best comics are those who don't rely on current affairs or niche cultures like TV too much. So comics have to generalise to find common ground with the punters and Britain, we just take the piss out of each other. There's a kind of irreverence amongst British people that means that everybody is fair game when it comes to being the topic of a comic's routine. We're not allowed to take the piss out of the Irish anymore, but since the Welsh don't seem to like anybody, we target them. People from different social classes and backgrounds are easy fodder. Car drivers, caravaners, Scousers, people from different regions, people with ginger hair - humour is (should be) used to illustrate how different we all are while all being the same. By pointing out our differences we bring ourselves together. We can become suspicious of those who we feel we can't take the piss out of or those who take themselves too seriously - Chorlton-dwelling lesbians, for example. But it's useful that we can all be stereotyped in some comic parody, and most people appreciate that this is lighthearted and using certain jokes that play on stereotypes can be used to break down tricky social barriers when meeting folk from different backgrounds.

When I meet a teacher for example, I always remember to ask them if they're worn out from all that 9 to 3.30 working and all the holidays they have to take. And of course, they appreciate the fact that I'm using humour, or sarcasm to be precise, to illustrate that I think they're a bunch of lazy, whinging bastards.


Spam almighty!
I hate spammers. I don't understand why they do it. People talk about the threat of global terrorism in terms of being blown up, but much more disruption is caused by people hacking into IT infrastructure and slowing things down by bombarding us with spam.

Just checked my Yahoo e-mail account, it said there was a new message somewhere, but it wasn't showing amongst recent messages. Scrolling down, I found it with a date sometime in August.

Some people need to get a life.


Nose pain
Nose hairs are a curse. Do you ever get those really sticky bogeys that glue them together so that when you pick them out, it really hurts. I've also got an idiopathic sore at the margin of outer and inner nostril; it's killing me.

I'm doing terrible eggy plappers too. I'm feeling a little under the weather I suppose. I should think about getting my flu jab over the next month or so, but look at this...

It's hard to spot, but some poor woman had written in to BBC News online's Have Your Say to tell us that the flu jab gave her palpitations. Others accuse the flu jab of giving them more serious things, such as actual flu itself, bird flu, cancer, chronic wind, bad teeth and unmanageable debt. It's all a government conspiracy and the flu jab actually contains a microscopic tracking device so the Myesterious They can keep tabs on us.

Think on!

Environazis

I love e-mail exchanges. Just see how something innocent can give me an excuse to descend into a ranting maniac.

Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 09:56:16 +0100

From: A.Colleague@work.uk
Subject: New phone

Dear all,

I now have a new direct dial number 123 4567, which was more complicated to organise that anything I have yet encountered! Prof's is still supporting me and is on 6789, which is where I will direct my phone when not in the office.

Thanks

And then it began...

And I thought you meant something exciting like a new mobile phone. Gadget freaks like me have no interest in landlines or any so-called "technology" that means you actually have to speak to people!

No, I am hoping to get a new phone when my friend recycles hers. I have her old old one now and will recycle that to [my girlfriend] who is still using the original nokia brick. You would weep.

Horrified. Can't get an upgrdade on mine until April and I'm itching for a new one.

Don't your friends laugh at you for having rubbish mobile phones? It would be a useful incentive to make you upgrade regularly.

Upgrading phones is very very bad for the environment, so to be avoided. Think of all that battery acid leaching into the earth, not to mention the resources needed to manufacture it. Shame on you.

I'm sorry? This is TECHNOLOGY we're talking about - stuff the environment! Mine always get recycled to luddite friends and mothers too. Or end up in a drawer somewhere.

Not upgrading because of the environment? That's like saying you shouldn't change your highly-polluting, inefficient old motor because of the manufacturing costs of new cars. Well, not quite, but having nice material things always takes priority over namby pamby rubbish like the "environment".

Tsk.

You've been living in Chorlton too long. You need to get out in the real world. And Chorlton needs to be turned into a landfill site for old mobile phones and bits of freezers and cars. That'd learn all those Guardian-reading, Camper-wearing, three-wheel pram-pushing dreamers!

Fascist

I love my Chorlton utopia.

I say again, shame on you and you polluting ways.

Chorlton is not the real world! It is a cocoon for people with misguided socialist ideals; people who think their taxes are well spent on the poor and needy. It is a poor man's Didsbury. Now there's an insult!

Besides, you live in Old Trafford.

I suppose we could all discard the trappings of civilisation and go and live in mud-huts, but the Mysterious They would still find excuses to tax us on mud-usage and blame us for all the world's ills.

The world will survive whatever humans throw at it. Humans might not, but that's probably a good thing if you think about it.

I bet you recycle

Saucer of milk!

My dad does.

Recycling is different - it helps to ensure that I can have my pop in cans instead of plastic bottles and that my car can be turned into another car when it dies.

I turn off lights and don't leave things on standby (like my PC monitor!). I use my car as little as possible (but this is more to do with my £160 a month petrol bill) and I send out as much documentation as possible in electronic format.

I turn the tap off when I brush my teeth and take showers instead of baths.

I try not to waste things.

I will not, however, start calculating my carbon balance or be made to feel guilty doing things that make my life just that little bit more bearable, enjoyable even. If this means getting a new gadget every now and again or, heaven forbid, going on holiday abroad a few times after not leaving the country for 11 years, then tough.

I went even further and started laying into working mothers whose heads are full of mush and who only ever talk about poo and the next holiday they're having in the school break and then everything sort of went blank and I came round slurping on a Cup a Soup.


Halal pizza??
Me and Trump were discussing if we should get takeaway pizza the other night. Considering the size of my arse, the answer should've been a resounding NO! However, I was all for it until she said that the only place locally was the curry/burger/kebab place. Now, they do great kebabs, I've had them, but this place is run by Muslim folk and, as such, they only use halal meat, which I'm not mad keen on the idea of at the best of times, but needs must. Worst still, there ain't no such thing as halal peperoni so their pizza toppings simply wouldn't be satisfactory. No peperoni? No ham? I'm sorry, but that's just not on! Kindly desist from advertising that you make so-called pizzas when you can't provide a full range of toppings!

Bloody fly-by-nights!

Bears in queer-bashing outrage

The Bears recently found a new friend. Unlike most of their friends, Twinkle, is a touch on the effeminate side and he likes to dress up all girlie-like, never shying away from a bit of mascara. On a recent night out in town however, the boys were set upon in an evil homophobic attack. This queer-bashing was caught on camera by intrepid roving-reporter, Sniffy:

No! Please don't smudge my mascara!

Witnesses looked on in horror as the the evil Trexi - a leading member of the British National Party - tried to bite poor Twinkle's head off. He was only deterred by the brave actions of RCMP Bear Chadwick, who fought him off valiantly while his Italian mate, Francesco, screamed like a girl and ran for it.

Bloody poofs.


Bear two
Talking of poofs, a couple of my favourite queers - Piggy and Tazzy - are shifting their internet efforts to a new venture. Check out those disgusting pervs' new site at www.abitpoofy.com. Bugger only knows what it's going to be like, but it can't be any worse than the shite they churn out at Tazzyandpiggydotcom.

Fuckers.


Bear three
I have recently regressed to seeking literary fulfilment from reading material that goes under the "graphic novels" genre, or "comics" to you and me. My particular favourite is Slave Labor Graphics' Bear, written by Jamie Smart.

Our hero Bear and his friend Karl spend their time trying to avoid being killed by Karl's psychotic cat, Looshkin.

Fucking brilliant, that's what it is. Unfortunately, I can't get hold of issue 2 anywhere, so if anybody has a copy they'd think of parting with, get in touch and we'll see about doing a swap... perhaps for a couple of proper books or something...

I've come to realise that words are too difficult and it's so much easier to follow pictures with just a bit of text, rather than wading through page upon page of descriptive text. I recently read a book called If we do not speak of remarkable things and I hated it - way too much description and it took me a couple of hundred pages and wasted a few weeks of my reading time just to say nothing much at all. It was one of the most irritating books I've ever read: the speech wasn't distinguished from normal text - no quotation marks or anything; the "story" jumped back and forth. Boring, boring drivel.

One book with real words that I did enjoy was Extremely loud and incredibly close, by Jonathan Safran Foer. It's about a young boy who finds a key in his dad's closet shortly after his death in the World Trade Center attacks of 11th September, 2001. He embarks on a journey across New York to find out about the key. It has some weird moments and the end is a bit of an anticlimax, but I reckon it's still worth a read despite this.


Bearly believable
I managed to hold off for nearly two whole weeks before I succumbed to buying a wireless router, but I gave in this weekend. It's great this wireless networking business: I can now surf the internet on my laptop from any location in range of the signal without need for wires and that. But still I find myself sat at my desk, laptop in front of me, ethernet cable within easy reach. How very ironic.

I guess now all we need is some way of transmitting electric power without cables since there are never enough power points in a room and the ones we have are always hidden behind immovable furniture. And yes, I have heard of batteries, but they never stay charged for long.

Why do electricians do that? Why do they always put power points at positions in a room where people are most likely to have really heavy furniture? Why do some DIYers put electric sockets in skirting boards? What's the fucking point of that? Have they not seen how plugs are designed (in the UK)? The cables don't bend at floor level and you can't plug stuff in - especially those huge bloody transformers that come on most power adapters these days.

Fucktards, the lot of them.

So there you go, queer-bashing, literature and DIY in one post. Plus a little bit of culture from LS Lowry too.

Ring a-ring a-ringroadrage

Ring roads are for losers!

There are two around Manchester: the big motorway one, the M60; and the little inner ring road of chaos that is just a bunch of normal old roads that have been identified by some twat in a planning office who did a join-the-dots and make a circle round the city centre with a red felt tip while looking at an A to Z.

Anyway, both of the bloody things are usually completely chocker and you're better off going right through the town centre, which is relatively clear because every poor bastard has been told to use the ring road.

That's all I have to say about ring roads, apart from they'd be much more fun if they didn't have any junctions on them to slow you down and you could just go round and round and round for a laugh, that'd be good.


It's all in a name
We sign up to so many things online, we're assigned usernames and passwords for this and that in the workplace too:

• Work, home and internet e-mail username and passwords
• Banking login details
• Shopping and auction sites
• Blogger, flickr, webshots, data repositories
  
• News forums

I know that I end up signing up for a couple of new things each year and with all this information to store, it's no wonder I get my usernames and passwords mixed up occasionally. It's for this reason that I used the wrong username when I was trying to log on and relicense my legitimately downloaded music.

Thick shit.

I am now Tunebite-stripping the re-acquired licences from the Gorillaz Demon Days album, which I downloaded in its entirety...listening to it as I go, I'm wondering why the fuck I downloaded it in the first place, it's a right load of crap. I suppose it might be ok if you're a drugged up student, but it won't have the longevity of something by Kylie.

While on the subject if signing in, I can't cope with those password authentication systems that request the xth, yth, or zth letter of your password or secret answer. They even ask for things like "the 5th, 1st, 8th letter of your password". I can't work that sort of shit out, for fuck's sake! Don't they realise that hackers and phishers are a lot cleverer than us mortals and they probably don't need to even know these answers to get into our bank accounts? I'm sure they only do it to make us feel like we're protected by a super safe internet security system.

One of my work e-mail accounts requires me to change my password every 4 weeks. In doing this, you're not allowed to use the same password if it has been used within the previous 6 months. You aren't allowed sequences of double letters or numbers. As a result, I come up with some corking passwords, but I can never remember them the next time I need to log in.


Bugz in the attic
Don't know about Bugz in the attic, but if you have a bug and you need to take a day off work, you don't need some nosy cunt questioning you for the sake of showing mock concern, while really sussing you out, when you get back to work.

3.30pm day back after day off fighting the Grim Reaper:
Star performer ("I'm only your lower-graded colleague, but I like to think that I'm more important than you and, the way I suck up and get the powers-that-be to believe every excuse I give them for being a workshy, useless fucktard, I certainly feel more important than you!"): "Tina, you've been off sick?"
Me: "Yes"
Star performer: "What was it?"
Me: "A bug"
Star performer: "Just a bug?" - What, you're not going into every detail to try to convince me that you were really ill like I do when I've had one of my "sick days"?
Me: "Yes, just a bug"

End of conversation.

Hot and cold

This just about sums up my life over the past couple of days.

• Achy joints
• Headache
• Stomach ache
• Tiredness
• Nausea
• Boiling hot
• Shivery cold
• Right as rain

Viruses are right bastards: they make you feel rotten for anything from 24 hours to two weeks and, with the 24hr variety, they make it look as if you're avoiding work and dumping on colleagues at a particularly stressful time for everybody else. Fuckers.

But there's also something quite nice about the symptoms described above; the state of half sleepy confusion and loss of time is so odd. Being in bed when you'd normally be in work allows you to hear things that you'd normally miss out on: children going to school; emergency vehicle sirens on the motorway; burglars trying to get into the house. But as you lie there, drifting in and out of consciousness, you wonder when you're going to get better and if you're going to get worse before the time when you can finally get up and feel human again.

After spending most of last night and today in bed, groaning in fitful sleep, I finally came to at 3pm today - my headache had started to subside, I could stomach the ginger biscuits that Connie had brought me and wafted under my nose like smelling salts.

Ahh ginger biscuits, they're so yummilicious!


Laptop keyboards are shite
They're nice and soft when you click them, but all the keys are too close together and some of the keys are in the wrong place. I can't get used to it.

I feel like I could do with a special device that disabled people use to type, like a stick attached to my head or voice recognition software.

And what about those daft little mouse pad things? Bloody hell, are they designed so people contort their hands in readiness for when they get rheumatoid arthritis or something?


Media madness
When I was a good girl, I bought music downloads from the MSN music store. I have quite a few tracks that I acquired this way. I can't play any of them because the licences weren't transferred from my dead PC and the relicensing thing doesn't work properly so I can't get new ones for them.

Thanks a bunch, bastards. They're all shite anyway and I get what I want from other sources these days.

...Like stuff on vinyl and everything! Yes, that's right a vinyl record, me! Whatever next? The truth is, like most normal people, I prefer digital media because you can cart it around with you, but when I heard a song called You got me thinkin' by a New Zealand outfit called The Tornadoes featuring Tyra Hammond [oh yes, should mention Opensouls too - check em out from the link in the comments] , I had to have it and the only format I could get it was vinyl. Of course I tried my usual download sources, but all I got was viruses. Fuckers.

Little

So here I am, piggybacking onto somebody else's wireless signal! The only problem with this is that you can't guarantee a connection and the plug might be pulled at any second. Miserable bastards.

Still, it's worth it for a laugh and just to see that the PC can do it.

Techno stuff isn't fun or interesting. Nor is spending hundreds of pounds on a laptop when sorting out your desktop is free. C'est la vie.

Le vie en rose.

Roses are red.

The Red Planet is Mars, which is in our solar system along with Jupiter, bringer of joy.

A few years ago, five to be precise, a band called Train had a hit with the song Drops of Jupiter which I loved. I loved it so much that I bought their album, which was shite. Shite is probably unfair, but it was certainly disappointing.

In the spring of this year, a band called The Feeling had a single out called Sewn, which I really liked. Unfortunately, their subsequent releases have been shite. One of them has the lines "Fill my little world right up". I'm sorry, but you can't take any song seriously when they include "little" in the lyrics. It's like Madonna's Like a prayer, one of the finest songs of all time ruined by the line "When you call my name, it's like a little prayer". Honestly.

Load of old bollocks, that's what it is.

I guess I dislike it because of the cringe-worthy "Can I get you a little drinkie, Sue?" in Abigail's Party.

Little, it's just a stupid, childish word.


V for Vendetta
I watched this film this afternoon. What a joy to see the Houses of Parliament being blown sky high. If only it were true. It'd make Bonfire Night worth it if they put on a display like that.


CUNTS!
Some fuckers kicked in one of the front fog lamps on my car when it parked outside Trump's yesterday evening.

Even my usually very liberal attitude is tested by these random acts of vandalism. These little shits who perpertrate such act will never contribute a thing to society; they just cause trouble, upset and hassle for the rest of us while we have to pay for the honour of keeping them in benefits or prison through our taxes. Surely we should just be able to kill them? Or at least stick a cattle prod to their testicles for a few hours? They wouldn't be kicking anything for a long time after that, would they?