My creativity has been somewhat diverted this month as I (stupidly as it turned out) agreed to do an Advent Calendar for the football forum I spend some time on. Most of the pictured are in-jokes and fairly unrepeatable anywhere else but basically something like this every day (an understanding of proper football is probably required here):

Why it's lovable wheeler-dealer 'Arry Redknapp from Tottenham Independent Traders. Let's see what the old rogue has to say:

"Top quality players here. Five million each, or three for Twelve mill. Can't say fairer than that can you? Tell you what, see Bentley here, yours for four million. Okay, 3. Two and a half? Not interested? Okay squire - I can see you drive a hard bargain. You might be interested in a job lot of africans I'll be getting in in January? I get 'em in cheap in bulk so could sort you out with three of four. Yeah? Give us your number then and I'll buzz you next month...."

It ended up taking a huge amount of my time.

I realise that's a really lame excuse for not blogging :(

Anyway, Merry Christmas to you all (and a Happy New Year as Mrs. Red Squirrel is flying over to visit for a couple of weeks so I might be rather busy). I'll leave you with a joke I heard last night.

Q: Two scousers in a car with no music playing - who's driving?

A: The Police.

Heh heh.

The people are revolting...

...apparently. Couldn't agree more myself.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is because I pass a particular poster site every day on the way into work. For the last week it has been emblazoned with an advert for what I assumed was yet another perfume ad, but that actually turned out to be for a personal alarm.

Not just any personal alarm - the 'Revolutionary' ila Dusk personal alarm.



I'm intrigued enough to bother looking this up because it's not often something 'Revolutionary' comes along.

I'd define an object as 'Revolutionary' as a great leap forward, a step change in design. My dictionary defines it as 'of, pertaining to, characterized by, or of the nature of a revolution, or a sudden, complete, or marked change' which basically says the same as I said just with a strange comma fetish.

So I wonder what 'Revolutionary' leap forward in personal protection is provided by the ila Dusk? Is it perhaps the abandonment of capital letters in their company name? Does it perform some wondrous new trick?

An alarm of any kind is designed to alert someone to an event - be it a bedside alarm waking you up, a burglar alarm or a car alarm. Does the ila Dusk have a new way of doing this? Noise and light have been done, so maybe it uses telepathy? Or magically texts the Police with 'Hlp. Bng mugd. tb xxx'? Or maybe it even projects 'Mama Mia' onto a nearby surface causing the attacker* to flee or risk his sanity (which would also make solving the crime much simpler - 'Yes, officer, it was the third man on the left. I recognise his inability to hit the high notes in Waterloo')?

Sadly it does none of those things. It screams like a girl, something I feel the girl frantically yanking at the thing in her handbag is probably better qualified to do. Oh, and it comes in different colours to match your shoes.

Something designed to allow women to accessorise? I fail to see what's 'Revolutionary' about that....





*Let's face it, the attacker is 99.9% likely to be a straight man. Unless there was serious dress envy going on.

According to GenderAnalyzer this blog is 60% female.

Arse. (59%)

Football. (56%)

It's a man's game. (56%)

Look at the top bollocks on that! (55%) Blokes rule

Um, 'fiscal analysis of quarterly financial projections'? (53%) Yay!

Pot Pourri. (57%) Shit!

Football. (54%) Just to be on the safe side

Romance. (65%) Argh!

Football. (62%) Phew

That 'Sex in the City' film wasn't a complete pile of exploitative wank. (100%) Game Over :(

Goddamn it...

I really dislike it when something I knew/liked/had/was into to suddenly becomes mainstream.

I'm very much not a mainstream person. At all.

So I was slightly dismayed this week to find that one of my favourite songs of all time - and one that was a little nugget of quality passed around to people you thought would embrace it (their 'Best Of...' album was called 'Best Kept Secrets') - has been chosen as the music for the new Tomb Raider adverts which seems to always be on every time I turn on the TV at the moment.

Sigh.

Here it is anyway - Gorecki by Lamb.

Cor, isn't it dark over there?

We just had a blackout.

I say 'we'. In fact, other people just had a blackout. I could just see them having a blackout (that covered half of Bristol apparently) but still had enough power to blog about it.

Suckers, you should live on our side of the street!

Still, my heart went out to them with their little candlelit urchin faces pressed to the window watching me sip a cup of tea from my electric kettle while standing under enough spotlight wattage to cut through mild steel and idly flicking through channels on the TV. Poor, poor people.

I'll go round and lend them a lump of coal later on to keep warm. I'm that kind of thoughtful person..... ;-)

It's a cracker...

After a couple of cheeky comments on my last post (weenie, I'm looking at you) I will simply say:

Days taken off ill by Department head with stomach bug : 5
Days taken off ill by Team Leader with stomach bug: 3
Days taken off ill by me with stomach bug: 1

So ner!



H'anyway here's something amusing I just heard on the tellybox;

They say that a woman's work is never done.

That's probably why they're paid less.

*chortle*

Aha!

It appears the reason I was so cold is that I have the deeply unpleasant stomach bug that's swept round our office.

Yuck.

On the plus side, I got paid for being ill. Having been a contractor for 8 years or so I had actually forgotten what it feels like. I'd got used to the nagging guilt that I clearly wasn't that ill and that I couldn't get up and GO AND EARN SOME MONEY. So to feel like I can actually recover from being ill without forcing myself is actually making me feel less ill.

Whatever will they think of next? Paying people when they're on holiday? Paying people to have babies? It's a crazy future ahead of us....

Warning: contains moaning

It's fucking freezing outside.

Admittedly I'm inside. With the heating on full blast.

And a fire going.

And wearing two jumpers.

And a scarf.

But it's bloody chilly out. I even saw ice on the way to work today - ICE!!!

Wake me when it's warm again.....

Time flies when you're a lazy git.

I've been told I've been neglecting this recently, so I'll try and make a big effort next week. No, honest.

As an aside, I have the cleverest cat in the world. Sure, lots of cat owners will say the same thing because their cat can recognise the sound of their car engine, or turn on a light switch, or meow in a way that sounds like words - but that's not what I mean.

I have a cat that's cleverer than most humans.

That's a big claim, but she's cleverer than most humans because she's mastered something that humans can only mimic on sci-fi shows with christmas lights and tinsel. That's right, my cat has mastered the art of matter transference - or teleportation if you will.

She (that is, Pink) can - in the blink of an eye - move from one side of the room to the other without appearing to occupy any space in between. More so, this skill is entirely repeatable. All you need to do is get her in a head lock and try and put anti-flea liquid onto the skin at the back of her neck - and suddenly *poof* she's the other side of the room hissing at you. Another blink of the eye and BANG!!! the cat flap is swinging in the wind and you won't see her for two months (and counting)....

Floyd on the other hand, likes to try and exercise his mind with complex physics. You may be aware of the paradox of Schroedinger's Cat - well Floyd and I have worked long and hard on this one, and it turns out that if you place a cat in a box after you've put some anti-flea liquid onto the skin at the back of his neck, then when you open the box to see if the cat is alive or not you get an effect last seen in the Alien movie franchise as an angry ball of fury will leap at your face and try and bite your hair off.

I can kind of understand their dislike of their new flea treatment. It turns out that pets can build up an immunity to the chemical treatment that is supposed to make their skin taste yucky to the fleas, and this will diminish its potency. Luckily for the world there's a new type that frankly stinks to high heaven. I'm guessing it's abandoned the clever 'skin-altering' technology in favour of just making the fleas leave for somewhere that smells better - the equivalent of taking a dump in a squatter's fridge.

Floyd really didn't like the smell so did a runner for a few hours. When he came bounding back in, his train of thought appeared to be something like:

'Happy, happy, joy, joy, I'm here! Meow! Look, it's me! Meow! What's that smell? Aaargh! It's following me! If I look over my shoulder it's even stronger! Aaaaargh! My nose! It's even worse if I run in a circle! Arrrrrrrrrrrgh! Quick, run away! Run awaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy!'

And then he'd run outside again for a few hours. It was pretty funny the first four times he did it, but got fairly tiresome after that. He even slept in the coal scuttle for three days (presumably to mask the stench) and made little black paw prints on every single surface in my flat.

Though it must be said that he lost of lot of weight whilst running away from his own neck for 24 hours. Maybe they should just market it as a diet treatment for obese pets?

Reasons why the 60s were a pile of arse, part 1

Apparently the 60s were great and basically invented things like love, drugs, playing tag with STDs, music and teflon.

You may have heard this already.

However the 60s were also responsible for many of the world's ills. For example, the 60s decided that this magnificent piece of architecture:


would actually be improved by adding this as the annexe:

Excellent work!