It's the start of the season tomorrow (that's the football (the proper one where you use your feet) season obviously) and I've not done my annual predictions yet.
I know this is a favourite time for some of you as you get to marvel is the rare occurrence of me being wrong occasionally, and I'm sure I won't be disappointing anyone this evening....
So, let's get it on:
1) The winners of the Premiership this season will be.....Chelsea. A brave shout, but I think that their squad is old and experienced and so is their coach. Ancelotti will bring the best tactically out of what is still a pretty strong group.
2) Second in the league will be.......Manure. Yes they lost Ronaldo and haven't replaced him with anything approaching the same ability, but removing the diving tosser from their side gives them a better formation to suit the other players.
3) Third will be.......Liverpool. Losing Alonso is a bad blow, and any injury to Torres of Gerrard will be curtains for any title bid.
4) Fourth will be.......Arsenal. Sorry Man City, I just can't see your best side emerge until too late in the season to challenge the gooners. Having said that, if the scummer's injury list get any worse then even holding on to fourth could be problematic.
5) I can't see beyond Man City, though they'll be closer to 6th than 4th.
6) I'm fancying Everton for 6th. Unless Lescott moves, then they might swap with Villa.
7) Villa for 7th. I'd hoped we'd poach Young but that looks a non-starter, and though they've lost Laursen and Barry I don't see them dropping off that much.
8) Time for realism. I just don't get the feeling that Spurs will push on this season. It's a stabilising year for us. Yes we'll beat the big teams but we'll crumble at times and lose stupid games when the big teams would close it out.
9) The three relegated teams will be Portsmouth, Wigan and Birmingham
10) Top scorer in the league will be Jermaine Defoe (oh come on, allow me some Spurs bias!)
11) Michael Owen will not score more than 15 league goals
12) But Darren Bent will
13) First Manager to be sacked will be Martinez of Wigan
14) Spurs will be in the top four at Christmas
15) A Premiership player will test positive for drugs (or will be penalised for not taking a test)
16) England will qualify for the World Cup with the best record of any European country
17) North Korea will make it to the World Cup finals
18) The squad that Capello picks for England at the World Cup finals will include Rooney, Heskey, Defoe and Owen, although Owen won't play a game.
19) Sunderland will finish in the top ten
20) Newcastle will not get promoted back to the Premiership this year.
A bit hurried are some of those, so I doubt I'm going to beat last year's score :(
At least Diet Coke pisses all over Diet Pepsi though *nods*
Friday, 14 August 2009
Thursday, 13 August 2009
Beauty
I observed women's buttocks the other day - and I saw beauty.
Not at the same time, I'd like to add.
No, I was purchasing a sandwich at a posh(ish) sandwich bar near work (by posh I mean - not fried bacon and without ketchup) and seeing as it provides excellent (if expensive) freshly made salads to order, it is normally half full of women.
(Would it be rude to point out to a lady that 'chicken, prawns, coleslaw, pickled onions, beef and pork' is possibly why your 'salad-only' diet is not quite working for you?)
Anyway, this one day while we were waiting in the sandwich queue, a young woman walked in with her buttocks in the wrong place. Seriously. Most people's buttocks are sort of halfway between the neck and the feet, it's just....well.....normal. This girl, however, had buttocks sprouting from where her hamstrings should be - but was still tall. Her proportions were just bizarre. Stumpy legs and the world's longest back.
Sadly for her, she was standing in the queue next to her inverse twin - Ms. Legs As Far As They Can Go.
They were both the same height as well, and they ended up looking like this (excuse my skills in Paint):
It was strangely hypnotic.
As for beauty, well I can thank Alfa Male for pointing this out to me on the way home from work one day. I've never seen a plane intersect a Cirrus cloud quite like this before, but I thought it was pretty damn beautiful.
Not at the same time, I'd like to add.
No, I was purchasing a sandwich at a posh(ish) sandwich bar near work (by posh I mean - not fried bacon and without ketchup) and seeing as it provides excellent (if expensive) freshly made salads to order, it is normally half full of women.
(Would it be rude to point out to a lady that 'chicken, prawns, coleslaw, pickled onions, beef and pork' is possibly why your 'salad-only' diet is not quite working for you?)
Anyway, this one day while we were waiting in the sandwich queue, a young woman walked in with her buttocks in the wrong place. Seriously. Most people's buttocks are sort of halfway between the neck and the feet, it's just....well.....normal. This girl, however, had buttocks sprouting from where her hamstrings should be - but was still tall. Her proportions were just bizarre. Stumpy legs and the world's longest back.
Sadly for her, she was standing in the queue next to her inverse twin - Ms. Legs As Far As They Can Go.
They were both the same height as well, and they ended up looking like this (excuse my skills in Paint):
It was strangely hypnotic.
As for beauty, well I can thank Alfa Male for pointing this out to me on the way home from work one day. I've never seen a plane intersect a Cirrus cloud quite like this before, but I thought it was pretty damn beautiful.
Friday, 7 August 2009
Wem-ber-lee, Wem-ber-lee, Wem-ber-lee!
The other week I attended the pre-season tournament known as the inaugural Wembley Cup.
(Though frankly, how they can call it a 'tournament' escapes me. 4 teams in the tournament, that each play two other teams - not all three. Therefore you have one team playing Africa's club champions on the Friday, followed by England's 10th best team on the Sunday - whilst another team plays Scotland's second best team on the Friday and Europe's club champions on the Sunday. Guess which team won? Yeah, the ones who didn't play Barcelona. Quelle surprise....)
As with all pre-season friendlies I hadn't been expecting a feast of great football, as most players take it as an opportunity to stroll about the park hitting over-ambitious balls into space and out for a throw-in.
But, and it's a big but, the Mighty Spurs were playing Barcelona. At Wembley. I'd not been before, so for a minor *ahem* amount of money and a half day off work, it seemed a bargain.
A friend from work (a fellow Spurs fan) and I trained it across to London and met up with my Dad at Baker Street. After several beers we opted to head up to Wembley to see some of the Celtic v Al Ahly game, stopping only for food on Wembley Way (£7 for a Pastie and Chips! Christ...). The stadium itself is pretty impressive and ultra-modern compared to the last one (escalators to the top tier? Why not), although it does feel rather sterile and lacking in atmosphere.
Worst of all, they *still* haven't worked out how to serve drinks/snacks at anything other than a snail's pace. At Cardiff's Millennium Stadium you barely have to stop moving throughout the queue whenever you want a beverage.
We finally got to our seats to watch the rest of the Celtic game. Sadly there was no scoreboard so we had no idea how long there was to go, or what the score was until Celtic scored their 5th and the announcer told us which minute it was scored in :)
It then started raining heavily, so I took a quick picture of the rainbow above the ground. Amazingly the stadium had over 50,000 people in it by this point!
As for the game itself, well Barcelona fielded their 'C' team (with the exception of Yaya Toure in central midfield, and I can only assume he was being punished for something by being there) while we played a 4-5-1 formation with a midget on his own up front. We were rubbish and deserved to be losing 1-0 at half time. In the second half they made 11 changes and brought on their 'D' team - quick as a flash our manager responded and brought on 4 graduates of our youth team. Our 'D' team was better than their 'D' team and we equalised with 5 minutes to go!
All that was left was to wait for over an hour for a tube, and to finally get home at 2:30am - completely knackered. Though at least I can say I've seen Barcelona play now... :)
(Though frankly, how they can call it a 'tournament' escapes me. 4 teams in the tournament, that each play two other teams - not all three. Therefore you have one team playing Africa's club champions on the Friday, followed by England's 10th best team on the Sunday - whilst another team plays Scotland's second best team on the Friday and Europe's club champions on the Sunday. Guess which team won? Yeah, the ones who didn't play Barcelona. Quelle surprise....)
As with all pre-season friendlies I hadn't been expecting a feast of great football, as most players take it as an opportunity to stroll about the park hitting over-ambitious balls into space and out for a throw-in.
But, and it's a big but, the Mighty Spurs were playing Barcelona. At Wembley. I'd not been before, so for a minor *ahem* amount of money and a half day off work, it seemed a bargain.
A friend from work (a fellow Spurs fan) and I trained it across to London and met up with my Dad at Baker Street. After several beers we opted to head up to Wembley to see some of the Celtic v Al Ahly game, stopping only for food on Wembley Way (£7 for a Pastie and Chips! Christ...). The stadium itself is pretty impressive and ultra-modern compared to the last one (escalators to the top tier? Why not), although it does feel rather sterile and lacking in atmosphere.
Worst of all, they *still* haven't worked out how to serve drinks/snacks at anything other than a snail's pace. At Cardiff's Millennium Stadium you barely have to stop moving throughout the queue whenever you want a beverage.
We finally got to our seats to watch the rest of the Celtic game. Sadly there was no scoreboard so we had no idea how long there was to go, or what the score was until Celtic scored their 5th and the announcer told us which minute it was scored in :)
It then started raining heavily, so I took a quick picture of the rainbow above the ground. Amazingly the stadium had over 50,000 people in it by this point!
As for the game itself, well Barcelona fielded their 'C' team (with the exception of Yaya Toure in central midfield, and I can only assume he was being punished for something by being there) while we played a 4-5-1 formation with a midget on his own up front. We were rubbish and deserved to be losing 1-0 at half time. In the second half they made 11 changes and brought on their 'D' team - quick as a flash our manager responded and brought on 4 graduates of our youth team. Our 'D' team was better than their 'D' team and we equalised with 5 minutes to go!
All that was left was to wait for over an hour for a tube, and to finally get home at 2:30am - completely knackered. Though at least I can say I've seen Barcelona play now... :)
Wednesday, 5 August 2009
Right then...
Okay, I've been a bit shit at updating this recently. In my defence there's been work, cricket, pre-season friendlies, big drunken catch-up sessions and murder getting in the way.
But enough of the rest of August's posts, let's talk babies.
Yeah. You heard me. The evil scrot-like things that refuse to stop bothering the planet like an intergalactic herpes infection.
Now I'm not averse to the concept of having children*, but there's no way I want them anytime soon - and rather brilliantly neither does Mrs. RS (a most beneficial side-effect of being the older person in a relationship). Maybe one day, you never know, but not in our near future.
If we do decide to have kids however and I ever turn into the type of parent I'm about to outline, you all officially have my permission to kill me in a variety of hideous ways.
For there is a type of parent (usually the father) whom lurches from disinterested 'yeah, gonna have a kid. That's my golf handicap out of the window' before the birth to 'my life is so amazing, I have a child. A baby. Awwww. A baby, Did I say I had a baby? Isn't she the most beautiful baby ever? Look, my baby. Awww. The building is on fire? Oh, well we'll only get through the first 10,000 baby photos before they evacuate us' afterwards.
The sort of person who's every sentence, every email, every text, twitter, blogpost, phone call or letter is about their bloody child. As if somehow they're the only people who have ever had children. As if doing something only 10 billion other humanoid creatures have ever done is somehow worthy of worship.
This is a genuine example from an acquaintance of mine with only the name changed - and is the sort of thing I get in a thrice-daily facebook update:
Piglet did her 1st crawl today!! Oh noes.....mobile baby!! Woo hoo!
I feel sick.
Yeah, you had a kid. Congrats. You achieved something hundreds of thousands of other people have done IN THIS COUNTRY THIS YEAR. Big ups to the nappy massive.
If someone who did something else that's rather tough, gets done once a year and is done by hundreds of thousands of people (say, run a marathon maybe) and talked about NOTHING ELSE everytime you saw them - you'd rightly tag them as a boring fucknut.
Of course, the vast majority of parents are not like this at all. The world is divided into two types - those that get on with raising their children, and those that get a sign in the back window of their car saying 'Baby on Board' - and we all know some boring fucknut like that....
This rant was brought to you by the emotion 'moody', the physical sensation 'tired' and the logical conclusion that too many parents are 'selfish wankers'.
*That may actually come as a genuine shock to some of you
But enough of the rest of August's posts, let's talk babies.
Yeah. You heard me. The evil scrot-like things that refuse to stop bothering the planet like an intergalactic herpes infection.
Now I'm not averse to the concept of having children*, but there's no way I want them anytime soon - and rather brilliantly neither does Mrs. RS (a most beneficial side-effect of being the older person in a relationship). Maybe one day, you never know, but not in our near future.
If we do decide to have kids however and I ever turn into the type of parent I'm about to outline, you all officially have my permission to kill me in a variety of hideous ways.
For there is a type of parent (usually the father) whom lurches from disinterested 'yeah, gonna have a kid. That's my golf handicap out of the window' before the birth to 'my life is so amazing, I have a child. A baby. Awwww. A baby, Did I say I had a baby? Isn't she the most beautiful baby ever? Look, my baby. Awww. The building is on fire? Oh, well we'll only get through the first 10,000 baby photos before they evacuate us' afterwards.
The sort of person who's every sentence, every email, every text, twitter, blogpost, phone call or letter is about their bloody child. As if somehow they're the only people who have ever had children. As if doing something only 10 billion other humanoid creatures have ever done is somehow worthy of worship.
This is a genuine example from an acquaintance of mine with only the name changed - and is the sort of thing I get in a thrice-daily facebook update:
Piglet did her 1st crawl today!! Oh noes.....mobile baby!! Woo hoo!
I feel sick.
Yeah, you had a kid. Congrats. You achieved something hundreds of thousands of other people have done IN THIS COUNTRY THIS YEAR. Big ups to the nappy massive.
If someone who did something else that's rather tough, gets done once a year and is done by hundreds of thousands of people (say, run a marathon maybe) and talked about NOTHING ELSE everytime you saw them - you'd rightly tag them as a boring fucknut.
Of course, the vast majority of parents are not like this at all. The world is divided into two types - those that get on with raising their children, and those that get a sign in the back window of their car saying 'Baby on Board' - and we all know some boring fucknut like that....
This rant was brought to you by the emotion 'moody', the physical sensation 'tired' and the logical conclusion that too many parents are 'selfish wankers'.
*That may actually come as a genuine shock to some of you
Friday, 31 July 2009
Howzat!
I'm at the cricket for a few days, so will update more next week.
(Suffice to say we skittled a few Aussie wickets today :) )
You'll be glad to hear that I've finally stopped singing the Trio advert. Sadly I've replaced it with this 80's classic...
Re-record, not fade away......Re-record, not fade away......
(Suffice to say we skittled a few Aussie wickets today :) )
You'll be glad to hear that I've finally stopped singing the Trio advert. Sadly I've replaced it with this 80's classic...
Re-record, not fade away......Re-record, not fade away......
Wednesday, 29 July 2009
Can't get you out of my head...
I've been singing this for two days now (interspersed with different words - and it's quite hard to get a single syllable word like 'beer' to stretch to four syllables). It's driving me mad!
If you're not both English and of a certain vintage then you won't understand this post at all! :)
If you're not both English and of a certain vintage then you won't understand this post at all! :)
Tuesday, 21 July 2009
The Potted History of the World
Welcome, welcome - a thousand welcomes - to the first of an infrequent series of posts about major historical events, major historical people, and major historical history stuff.
These won't be in chronological order because frankly, up until someone invented beer, history was boring as fuck. Instead I'll be choosing a random topic each time, as and when the mood takes me.
Chapter One - The New York Metro
Despite not being American, my grasp of that country's history is pretty impressive (even if I say so myself). So having visited the city several times recently to see Mrs RS, I decided to read up on the Metro - mainly to find out which century it was built in, as judging from most of the stations I went through I'd have estimated the 16th - and I was amazed by what I found.
The following is as true as I can make it.
*ahem*
Many years ago, like decades and stuff, America was divided between North and South. The South believed that everyone should drive pickups, whilst the North believed that everyone should drive pickups - except the poor, who should be provided with trains.
A vast and bloody war was fought, and for a long time it looked as though the South would win. Facing defeat (and the frequent bombings of its railroads), the North constructed a secret train system on the island of Manhattan. To avoid it being bombed, they placed it in a series of tunnels under the streets and this soon became known as the 'underground railroad' of the civil war.
To outwit its enemies and confuse would-be saboteurs, the operators of the underground railroad settled on an ingenious and fiendishly clever system. This is why some lines are named after numbers and some lines are named after letters. This is also why some lines are the same colour as other lines. See a yellow train? Ah, yes, - that's a N. Or a R. Or a Q. Or even a W. And a R doesn't run on a Sunday after 4pm, what are you buddy? Stoooooooopid?
It's not at all confusing.
Anyway, in the post-war years America was skint but was determined to expand the underground railroad. Digging tunnels was expensive, so the moment they dug under the East River and reached Long Island, they simply stopped putting roofs on the tunnels and left them as open culverts throughout the rest of the city. This cost-saving measure enabled the Metro owners to vastly expand the system in almost no time.
Sadly, as always, pedantry won out and the owners conceded that since the new tracks were not underground anymore, they couldn't call it the 'underground railroad.' In what was the first of its kind in the world, the Metro accepted corporate sponsorship from a sandwich company and changed its name to 'The New York Subway'.
*Fast forward a few years*
Everything was going swimmingly until the infamous New York Sanitation Workers strike of '73. With rubbish piling up in the streets, the forever resourceful inhabitants decided to combine two successful ideas into one - the landfill and the Subway - and simply threw their rubbish into the big hole in the ground that the trains ran through. In no time at all the tracks became nearly impassable.
This practice continues to this day, although New Yorkers prefer to refer to this act as 'recycling'. Here's a picture I took last time I was there:
The Subway operators needed a solution to get their trains through and a certain railway worker called Dwight T Gefluffenheim, inspired by the idea of 'recycling', came up with the remedy. This is why all New York Subway trains are fitted with Cow-catchers to this day. Here's another photo I took while I was there:
As New York got larger, so did the 'garbage' problem. The level was getting so high that the trains were carving their own tunnels through the rubbish. In 1989 one of the larger tunnels of this kind - the Brooklyn Used Nappy Central - collapsed, injuring several passengers. Eventually the Subway operators bowed to the inevitable and built all new lines on stilts, eg:
This is primarily because it's really hard to throw your rubbish up onto the track from street level.
And that's the true story of the New York Metro system - always innovative, always thinking and always going for that 'medieval dungeon' look.
These won't be in chronological order because frankly, up until someone invented beer, history was boring as fuck. Instead I'll be choosing a random topic each time, as and when the mood takes me.
Chapter One - The New York Metro
Despite not being American, my grasp of that country's history is pretty impressive (even if I say so myself). So having visited the city several times recently to see Mrs RS, I decided to read up on the Metro - mainly to find out which century it was built in, as judging from most of the stations I went through I'd have estimated the 16th - and I was amazed by what I found.
The following is as true as I can make it.
*ahem*
Many years ago, like decades and stuff, America was divided between North and South. The South believed that everyone should drive pickups, whilst the North believed that everyone should drive pickups - except the poor, who should be provided with trains.
A vast and bloody war was fought, and for a long time it looked as though the South would win. Facing defeat (and the frequent bombings of its railroads), the North constructed a secret train system on the island of Manhattan. To avoid it being bombed, they placed it in a series of tunnels under the streets and this soon became known as the 'underground railroad' of the civil war.
To outwit its enemies and confuse would-be saboteurs, the operators of the underground railroad settled on an ingenious and fiendishly clever system. This is why some lines are named after numbers and some lines are named after letters. This is also why some lines are the same colour as other lines. See a yellow train? Ah, yes, - that's a N. Or a R. Or a Q. Or even a W. And a R doesn't run on a Sunday after 4pm, what are you buddy? Stoooooooopid?
It's not at all confusing.
Anyway, in the post-war years America was skint but was determined to expand the underground railroad. Digging tunnels was expensive, so the moment they dug under the East River and reached Long Island, they simply stopped putting roofs on the tunnels and left them as open culverts throughout the rest of the city. This cost-saving measure enabled the Metro owners to vastly expand the system in almost no time.
Sadly, as always, pedantry won out and the owners conceded that since the new tracks were not underground anymore, they couldn't call it the 'underground railroad.' In what was the first of its kind in the world, the Metro accepted corporate sponsorship from a sandwich company and changed its name to 'The New York Subway'.
*Fast forward a few years*
Everything was going swimmingly until the infamous New York Sanitation Workers strike of '73. With rubbish piling up in the streets, the forever resourceful inhabitants decided to combine two successful ideas into one - the landfill and the Subway - and simply threw their rubbish into the big hole in the ground that the trains ran through. In no time at all the tracks became nearly impassable.
This practice continues to this day, although New Yorkers prefer to refer to this act as 'recycling'. Here's a picture I took last time I was there:
The Subway operators needed a solution to get their trains through and a certain railway worker called Dwight T Gefluffenheim, inspired by the idea of 'recycling', came up with the remedy. This is why all New York Subway trains are fitted with Cow-catchers to this day. Here's another photo I took while I was there:
As New York got larger, so did the 'garbage' problem. The level was getting so high that the trains were carving their own tunnels through the rubbish. In 1989 one of the larger tunnels of this kind - the Brooklyn Used Nappy Central - collapsed, injuring several passengers. Eventually the Subway operators bowed to the inevitable and built all new lines on stilts, eg:
This is primarily because it's really hard to throw your rubbish up onto the track from street level.
And that's the true story of the New York Metro system - always innovative, always thinking and always going for that 'medieval dungeon' look.
Monday, 20 July 2009
Lessons in life pt. 27
They're coming thick and fast at the moment. Today's was:
When you are surreptitiously listening at work to an incredibly close cricket match between England and Australia (one headphone in your right ear that no-one walking past can see), and Freddie Flintoff gets Brad Haddin with the 10th ball of the day - do not do a pathetic Tim Henman-esque fist pump whilst shouting out 'YEEEESSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!' because you might be regarded as a bit of a weirdo by your colleagues whom, funnily enough, can't hear the commentary in your headphones.
When you are surreptitiously listening at work to an incredibly close cricket match between England and Australia (one headphone in your right ear that no-one walking past can see), and Freddie Flintoff gets Brad Haddin with the 10th ball of the day - do not do a pathetic Tim Henman-esque fist pump whilst shouting out 'YEEEESSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!' because you might be regarded as a bit of a weirdo by your colleagues whom, funnily enough, can't hear the commentary in your headphones.
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
Lessons in life pt. 26
How was your day? Good I hope.
Mine started with the following conversation which, as those of you that have seen me first thing in the morning will understand, left me a little confused all day:
Colleague: "Hey {my real name}, you'll know this - when was Reagan assassinated?"
Me : "Um, do you mean shot?"
Colleague: "Yeah"
Me: "1981 I think" (Trivia I can do*)
Colleague: "Nooooo, Tainted Love never came out that early"
Um, what?!? Is there something about Marc Almond I don't know here???
Anyway, the lesson in life I alluded to in the title is this:
If you intend to pull a sickie for a few days to attend a festival, do not - I repeat, do not - get a T-shirt made up that says "I'm a skiving bastard". Do not then wear it to the festival. Do not get lots of your friends to take pictures of you in it and, most important of all, do not then put those pictures on your facebook profile.
Especially if your boss is a friend of yours on facebook.
Here endeth both the lesson and your job, old son.
*I was right too. I kick arse at pub quizzes. Unless they're about music or TV. Or classical literature.
Mine started with the following conversation which, as those of you that have seen me first thing in the morning will understand, left me a little confused all day:
Colleague: "Hey {my real name}, you'll know this - when was Reagan assassinated?"
Me : "Um, do you mean shot?"
Colleague: "Yeah"
Me: "1981 I think" (Trivia I can do*)
Colleague: "Nooooo, Tainted Love never came out that early"
Um, what?!? Is there something about Marc Almond I don't know here???
Anyway, the lesson in life I alluded to in the title is this:
If you intend to pull a sickie for a few days to attend a festival, do not - I repeat, do not - get a T-shirt made up that says "I'm a skiving bastard". Do not then wear it to the festival. Do not get lots of your friends to take pictures of you in it and, most important of all, do not then put those pictures on your facebook profile.
Especially if your boss is a friend of yours on facebook.
Here endeth both the lesson and your job, old son.
*I was right too. I kick arse at pub quizzes. Unless they're about music or TV. Or classical literature.
Monday, 13 July 2009
Maybe it's just me...
...but has anyone else noticed a sudden increase in people dragging their bags behind them on little plastic wheels? You know the sort - the ones where as you hear them approach down the street you instinctively look up to see how low the jet aircraft is, only to be disappointed as some beardy in a suit roars past you at 2 mph.
Noisy fuckers like this guy:
Note how that the universal rule of group photos* applies across intergalactic species.
And this is a top secret shot of the last gathering (or 'Conference') of the Luggage Masters (aka the 'Bag Snatchers') - taken with a hidden camera secreted inside a turncoat holdall:
See how even at Alien conferences you still have to wear a name tag.
Noisy fuckers like this guy:
Fair enough if people were actually using them for to go on holiday, but it seems to have suddenly become acceptable to wheel stuff to work because apparently carrying your sandwiches became 'too heavy' and didn't generate more decibels than the Williams sisters at a Pizza Hut all-you-can-eat buffet.
I've spent a long time thinking about why this is suddenly so prevalent, and now I finally have the solution.
Clearly we're being invaded by Aliens.
Clever Aliens that have but one purpose in life - to enslave humankind. Obviously these creatures arrive from off world in an embryonic stage known as a 'handbag'. Taken home by unsuspecting weak-willed victims, these 'handbags' hide themselves away (after all - how many times have you (or your lady friend) desperately searched for your favourite handbag that you could've sworn was on the table only five minutes ago) and hatch overnight into the hard-wheeled box monsters we see on the street every day. In fact, whilst you sleep these Aliens are controlling your mind, forcing you to obey your master and drag it around with you all the time - even if you have nothing to carry at all!
You don't believe me? Okay, I offer proof.
This is a photo of the 'Samsonite' family at Christmas:
Note how that the universal rule of group photos* applies across intergalactic species.
And this is a top secret shot of the last gathering (or 'Conference') of the Luggage Masters (aka the 'Bag Snatchers') - taken with a hidden camera secreted inside a turncoat holdall:
See how even at Alien conferences you still have to wear a name tag.
It was at this gathering that the leader of the Luggage Masters (the one proudly displaying his handle in the middle that suspiciously looks like an inverse Hitler) declared stage one of his masterplan complete. Only you can stop them!
Still not convinced? I shall leave you with the wise words of my good friend Dr Miles Bennell:
"They're not human! They're here already! You're next!!!....."
You have been warned...
*That in every group photo, at least one person has to act like an idiot.
Saturday, 11 July 2009
Redux
I love the Avenue near where Mrs. RS lives - it's 99 cent store heaven! :)
And here's my new favourite:
Can you see it? Can you?
Probably not, so here's the sign in the left hand window:
Every item is 99 cents or less!
But what's that in the right hand window?
Every item is 99 cents and up!
Errrr, what?!?
My brain hurts now. The only way to explain that tautology is that everything is exactly 99 cents. Except that nothing in that store is.
Like I said, I love that Avenue....
And here's my new favourite:
Can you see it? Can you?
Probably not, so here's the sign in the left hand window:
Every item is 99 cents or less!
But what's that in the right hand window?
Every item is 99 cents and up!
Errrr, what?!?
My brain hurts now. The only way to explain that tautology is that everything is exactly 99 cents. Except that nothing in that store is.
Like I said, I love that Avenue....
Monday, 6 July 2009
Broken
I am so broken right now. Obviously, the most sensible thing to do when you're jet-lagged, lacking sleep and have gone straight back into work for two frenetic days, is to spend the first day of your weekend drinking in the sun.
Drinking in the sun all day.
And all night too.
And a significant chunk of the next morning as well.
As I said - broken.... :(
Anyway, after a lovely BBQ at Token's house (and having watched the Lions finally beat Seffrica at Rugby) a group of us headed to the National Forest Folk Festival.
I know what you're thinking, and yes - the first thing I did was quaff a four-pint jug of beer :)
The first act was a ceilidh band who's female violinist kept yelping/yapping in such a way that I'd imagine someone making love to her would have a similar experience to shagging a chihuahua.
*erases horrible mental image*
The second act was a magician that finished his act by throwing up and catching (in his mouth) four ping-pong balls. That probably doesn't sound that impressive - but then how many ping-pong balls can you fit in your mouth?
The final act was the brilliant and funny Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain. Never heard of them? Well today is your lucky day because I've gone to great lengths to find some links for you. Imagine six or more people playing ukeleles and nothing but ukeleles. Here they are playing:
Shaft
Teenage Dirtbag
Anarchy in the UK
Le Freak
They are, I'm sure you'll admit, not exactly what you were expecting :)
I couldn't possibly leave a weekend post without a picture, so I snapped this on the way home from work today. Some idiot had quite deliberately climbed over the barriers to leave a footprint in fresh concrete after some work was done on the local street lighting. You've got to love the forthright reponse from the workmen the next morning....
Drinking in the sun all day.
And all night too.
And a significant chunk of the next morning as well.
As I said - broken.... :(
Anyway, after a lovely BBQ at Token's house (and having watched the Lions finally beat Seffrica at Rugby) a group of us headed to the National Forest Folk Festival.
I know what you're thinking, and yes - the first thing I did was quaff a four-pint jug of beer :)
The first act was a ceilidh band who's female violinist kept yelping/yapping in such a way that I'd imagine someone making love to her would have a similar experience to shagging a chihuahua.
*erases horrible mental image*
The second act was a magician that finished his act by throwing up and catching (in his mouth) four ping-pong balls. That probably doesn't sound that impressive - but then how many ping-pong balls can you fit in your mouth?
The final act was the brilliant and funny Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain. Never heard of them? Well today is your lucky day because I've gone to great lengths to find some links for you. Imagine six or more people playing ukeleles and nothing but ukeleles. Here they are playing:
Shaft
Teenage Dirtbag
Anarchy in the UK
Le Freak
They are, I'm sure you'll admit, not exactly what you were expecting :)
I couldn't possibly leave a weekend post without a picture, so I snapped this on the way home from work today. Some idiot had quite deliberately climbed over the barriers to leave a footprint in fresh concrete after some work was done on the local street lighting. You've got to love the forthright reponse from the workmen the next morning....
Thursday, 2 July 2009
Not wanting to shock you or anything....
....but I'm actually English.
And because of this fact I would like to address this post to the two FUCKING SELFISH rabbis who sat next to me during my flight back last night:
"Thank you so much for denying me sleep at any point during this flight. Thank you so much for drowning out every single announcement by the cabin staff/captain for the entire flight. Thank you so much for being such ego-centric retarded fucks that you thought that the entire plane wanted to hear you discuss the minutiae of the Torah.
FOR EIGHT FUCKING HOURS.
Thank you so much for refusing to SHUT THE FUCK UP whilst eating your kosher meal that you complained about not being kosher and then ate anyway (you hypocritical c*nts), drinking (how did you do it?), apparently dozing (I nearly stabbed you in the eye with a plastic tea-stirrer at this point) and even when the other rabbi was in the toilet (why?!? WHY?!? He WASN'T THERE you dumb bastard. SHUT UP!!!! LET ME SLEEP!!!!). Were the two of you on a sponsored talk bollocks-a-thon? I nearly throttled you before we even took off because:
a) you talk TOO FUCKING LOUDLY
b) you talk a load of bullshit. I don't care what you believe, I do not have to be forced to listen to you exclaim about absolutely nothing
c) that stupid stereotypical jewish rabbi 'claw' hand gesture you do everytime you make a point. Were you trained to do this, because you both did at exactly the same time?
d) you both sound like an exceedingly humourless, racist, retarded Mel Brooks. On crack.
Die horrible deaths. Horrible, horrible deaths."
Of course I said nothing, because I'm English. I tutted once, but it made no difference. The heathens.
As a consequence I'm lacking sleep and am a tad cranky. I don't think it shows.
And because of this fact I would like to address this post to the two FUCKING SELFISH rabbis who sat next to me during my flight back last night:
"Thank you so much for denying me sleep at any point during this flight. Thank you so much for drowning out every single announcement by the cabin staff/captain for the entire flight. Thank you so much for being such ego-centric retarded fucks that you thought that the entire plane wanted to hear you discuss the minutiae of the Torah.
FOR EIGHT FUCKING HOURS.
Thank you so much for refusing to SHUT THE FUCK UP whilst eating your kosher meal that you complained about not being kosher and then ate anyway (you hypocritical c*nts), drinking (how did you do it?), apparently dozing (I nearly stabbed you in the eye with a plastic tea-stirrer at this point) and even when the other rabbi was in the toilet (why?!? WHY?!? He WASN'T THERE you dumb bastard. SHUT UP!!!! LET ME SLEEP!!!!). Were the two of you on a sponsored talk bollocks-a-thon? I nearly throttled you before we even took off because:
a) you talk TOO FUCKING LOUDLY
b) you talk a load of bullshit. I don't care what you believe, I do not have to be forced to listen to you exclaim about absolutely nothing
c) that stupid stereotypical jewish rabbi 'claw' hand gesture you do everytime you make a point. Were you trained to do this, because you both did at exactly the same time?
d) you both sound like an exceedingly humourless, racist, retarded Mel Brooks. On crack.
Die horrible deaths. Horrible, horrible deaths."
Of course I said nothing, because I'm English. I tutted once, but it made no difference. The heathens.
As a consequence I'm lacking sleep and am a tad cranky. I don't think it shows.
Tuesday, 30 June 2009
H'afternoon
I'm not dead or anything, just jetted over to the states to stand outside a hospital and cry about someone I never met, was never going to meet and had no relevance to my life apart from singing songs and slowing changing colour over the decades.
I mean, just jetted over to the states to visit my girlfriend. Honest.....
I mean, just jetted over to the states to visit my girlfriend. Honest.....
Monday, 22 June 2009
Just because...
I'm off to New York again tomorrow to see Mrs. RS for a week, but I'm taking my laptop with me and will check in now and then (survive without the internet? Not likely!). I hope everyone has a lovely week :)
I shall leave you with this, courtesy of Sweet Cheeks!
I shall leave you with this, courtesy of Sweet Cheeks!
Too true. Too true.
Friday, 19 June 2009
Um, was that you???
Gas.
The area in which I work is an 'urban regeneration zone'. It used to be factories and breweries and tobacco warehouses - and now, with a huge injection of EU money, it's being rebuilt as offices and flats for people who want to spend £400,000 on a one bedroomed box simply because the outside of the building is old and it looks over a canal.
About a year ago the huge pile drivers digging foundations for some buildings managed to rupture a gas main. They evacuated a good chunk of the centre of Bristol, but because they did so in the same road as the main fire station, it was all resolved without much fuss.
Or so we thought.
For the last 6 months, the gas company has been digging up and replacing ALL the gas mains in the area. It turned out that when they went to fix the leak they discovered that the pipe appeared to have been constructed of Ryvita. We've all got used to walking past a big hole in the road, in the middle of which is a pipe join something like this:
Every few weeks they replace the old Victorian pipes with yellow plastic ones, fill the hole in, and move 75 yards down the road and dig another hole. That is, until they reached the end of their project.
The final gas main lay under the exit of one of the main bridges in the centre of town. It's always smelt slightly of gas over the last 18 months - in fact the gas engineers had brilliantly just run a open vented pipe through the pavement to let the gas escape rather than build up. An open gas pipe in the middle of the pavement as smokers walk by. I can see no flaw in this plan.
Anyway, last month they closed half the bridge and dug it up to expose the pipe join. On my way into work that morning I passed about 12 senior looking men in hard hats standing around a big hole, all shaking their heads slowly. It really looked like someone had died, so I wandered over to have a look.
(I'm nosey, so what? :) )
In the middle of the hole was a pipe join. Except it didn't look like the above picture, no no no. It was two pipes, one about 30% wider than the other that been *taped* together with yellow sticky tape.
This was the major gas junction for a square mile and someone had decided the best way to join two pipes was to splash out on three rolls of yellow gaffer tape.
I'm surprised they didn't try welding it....
Potentially explosive situations aside, does anyone own a Nokia N85 phone? I got one last week and it's ace.
A small tip though, if you use it as a MP3 player (and why not, with its 8GB memory card as standard) with headphones plugged in, do not have it on silent mode.
For if you receive a message or phone call while the phone is in SILENT mode, it decides that seeing as the phone is in SILENT mode - and you have headphones plugged in - that actually what it will do is switch to loudspeaker mode and blast your music out at 100% volume until you frantically hit any button to shut it up.
A nice touch that - the world's first 'ironic' silent mode.
My office especially enjoyed my phone blaring out 'Sweet MOTHERFUCKING country acid house music ALL NIGHT LONG!!!' for no apparent reason while I beat it with my keyboard.
Cringe factor ten.
The area in which I work is an 'urban regeneration zone'. It used to be factories and breweries and tobacco warehouses - and now, with a huge injection of EU money, it's being rebuilt as offices and flats for people who want to spend £400,000 on a one bedroomed box simply because the outside of the building is old and it looks over a canal.
About a year ago the huge pile drivers digging foundations for some buildings managed to rupture a gas main. They evacuated a good chunk of the centre of Bristol, but because they did so in the same road as the main fire station, it was all resolved without much fuss.
Or so we thought.
For the last 6 months, the gas company has been digging up and replacing ALL the gas mains in the area. It turned out that when they went to fix the leak they discovered that the pipe appeared to have been constructed of Ryvita. We've all got used to walking past a big hole in the road, in the middle of which is a pipe join something like this:
Every few weeks they replace the old Victorian pipes with yellow plastic ones, fill the hole in, and move 75 yards down the road and dig another hole. That is, until they reached the end of their project.
The final gas main lay under the exit of one of the main bridges in the centre of town. It's always smelt slightly of gas over the last 18 months - in fact the gas engineers had brilliantly just run a open vented pipe through the pavement to let the gas escape rather than build up. An open gas pipe in the middle of the pavement as smokers walk by. I can see no flaw in this plan.
Anyway, last month they closed half the bridge and dug it up to expose the pipe join. On my way into work that morning I passed about 12 senior looking men in hard hats standing around a big hole, all shaking their heads slowly. It really looked like someone had died, so I wandered over to have a look.
(I'm nosey, so what? :) )
In the middle of the hole was a pipe join. Except it didn't look like the above picture, no no no. It was two pipes, one about 30% wider than the other that been *taped* together with yellow sticky tape.
This was the major gas junction for a square mile and someone had decided the best way to join two pipes was to splash out on three rolls of yellow gaffer tape.
I'm surprised they didn't try welding it....
Potentially explosive situations aside, does anyone own a Nokia N85 phone? I got one last week and it's ace.
A small tip though, if you use it as a MP3 player (and why not, with its 8GB memory card as standard) with headphones plugged in, do not have it on silent mode.
For if you receive a message or phone call while the phone is in SILENT mode, it decides that seeing as the phone is in SILENT mode - and you have headphones plugged in - that actually what it will do is switch to loudspeaker mode and blast your music out at 100% volume until you frantically hit any button to shut it up.
A nice touch that - the world's first 'ironic' silent mode.
My office especially enjoyed my phone blaring out 'Sweet MOTHERFUCKING country acid house music ALL NIGHT LONG!!!' for no apparent reason while I beat it with my keyboard.
Cringe factor ten.
Monday, 15 June 2009
There's hope for us all
The company I work for hosts a regular series of 'webinars' on various scientific topics (I'd like, at this point, to morally object to such an abortion of a word).
Last week they held one at 9am.
At 8:45am, a gentleman entered the reception of our London office and asked which room the 'webinar' was in.
So it just goes to show - you can be a Professor of Physics at a world-renowned University and still be as thick as pig shit.
There is indeed hope for us all.
Last week they held one at 9am.
At 8:45am, a gentleman entered the reception of our London office and asked which room the 'webinar' was in.
So it just goes to show - you can be a Professor of Physics at a world-renowned University and still be as thick as pig shit.
There is indeed hope for us all.
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
Procrastination
What I should be doing right now is re-potting more seedlings (because I like growing things - especially yummy tapas things). I can't really be arsed though, plus my living room floor already looks like this:
I'm going to be eating a lot of pimientos in the Autumn!
Anyway, this post wasn't about food, it was going to be about what I did the other week.
Do you know what I did the other week? No, of course you don't - I haven't told you yet.
I went to see the filming of QI in Londinium :)
Living (as I do) on the other side of the country, it meant that I had to take an afternoon off work to get to the filming by 6:45pm. So - obviously - I spent a two hour lunch in the pub, a short break in the pub at the train station, a two hour train journey with beers and a couple of beers in a pub opposite the studios while waiting for everyone else to turn up. I even managed to squeeze in a quick pint with my Dad who was in the vicinity at the time.
The person who'd invited me was an old friend and colleague whom I'd not seen in quite a while - mainly because he lives hundreds of miles away and has bad aids (or 'kids' as they're also known) and we had a lovely catch-up (over a pint) while waiting for his two other friends to turn up - the last of which did at 6:30pm, and then promptly got a round in.
None of us had ever been to a TV recording before, so we made sure we left the pub at 6:45pm and walked over the road to the studios, clutching our printed tickets.
There were two queues. One with a hundred people in, one with a thousand.
We had tickets, so sidled up to the back of the smaller queue. It was for Have I Got News For You.
Arse.
We slunk back around the side of the building to join the back of the huge queue, only to hear a TV bod (possibly a 'runner' or a 'fluffer' or something) proclaim that from 'this point on' (200 people in front of us), the show was full.
Thank you very much. Please come again.
Double arse. It seems our ticket was on a first-come, first-served basis. Ah, how naive we were...
We contemplated the pub, but then made a split-second decision to join the back of the HIGNFY queue again and try and blag our way in. Genius plan - I'm like that when I wasted.
This worked brilliantly and we were soon past security who glanced at our 'tickets' without noticing they were from the wrong show, though we nearly tried to sneak onto the back of the QI queue as they filed past us into their theatre. Then, disaster, we saw another fluffer counting down the HIGNFY queue and we could see that we were going to miss out again. Quick as a flash we took a show of hands and voted that the dutch guy in our group should go and pretend to be 'foreign' to a nearby security guard and say that we joined the wrong queue and should be in the QI lot.
Bizarrely he agreed, only to be rebuffed by the security guard who placed him in a 'standby' queue outside the main gate. We waved, and waited to put our names down for 'guaranteed' HIGNFY tickets for the next season.
We resigned ourselves to more beers in the pub, when suddenly the security guard came rushing past into the street and brought the dutch guy back past security (even though he was about 20th in the standby queue), grabbed us on the way through and rushed us into the QI theatre. It turned out that 4 VIP guests had failed to turn up, and so we got their seats.
Awesome seats too. :)
I won't say much about the filming, beyond that Stephen Fry is very funny, it takes two hours to make a thirty minute show, and that we're in the one with the question about 'Who had the first driving licence?' The drunken guy laughing loudly is probably me!
We barely had time to get another pint in the pub before I had to dash across London to get a train that was then cancelled, before getting into Bristol at 1:30am on the only other train westwards which unfortunately stopped at the station on the outskirts of Bristol. I had no cash on me to get a taxi so had to stop at the cash machine to stock up and promptly missed every single taxi.
Triple arse.
So, there I am, standing in a freezing cold car park at 1:45am with a banging headache kicking in - and I had to be at work in 7 hours - when a entirely random posh couple came *back* in their taxi and offered myself (and the other stranded person, a completely wasted oldster in a bow tie) a lift. They were on their way to their 'club' in Posh Bristol (at 2am, wtf?) so were going near my house.
I then had a very interesting conversation all the way back with this seriously minted couple (the bow tie wearer, when asked what sort of day he'd had, had replied in a bemused tone "I honestly couldn't tell you" and then fell asleep) who'd been in London to see the opera and 'spend some money at Harvey Nicks'.
I got to sleep at 2:15am. Top day :)
I'm going to be eating a lot of pimientos in the Autumn!
Anyway, this post wasn't about food, it was going to be about what I did the other week.
Do you know what I did the other week? No, of course you don't - I haven't told you yet.
I went to see the filming of QI in Londinium :)
Living (as I do) on the other side of the country, it meant that I had to take an afternoon off work to get to the filming by 6:45pm. So - obviously - I spent a two hour lunch in the pub, a short break in the pub at the train station, a two hour train journey with beers and a couple of beers in a pub opposite the studios while waiting for everyone else to turn up. I even managed to squeeze in a quick pint with my Dad who was in the vicinity at the time.
The person who'd invited me was an old friend and colleague whom I'd not seen in quite a while - mainly because he lives hundreds of miles away and has bad aids (or 'kids' as they're also known) and we had a lovely catch-up (over a pint) while waiting for his two other friends to turn up - the last of which did at 6:30pm, and then promptly got a round in.
None of us had ever been to a TV recording before, so we made sure we left the pub at 6:45pm and walked over the road to the studios, clutching our printed tickets.
There were two queues. One with a hundred people in, one with a thousand.
We had tickets, so sidled up to the back of the smaller queue. It was for Have I Got News For You.
Arse.
We slunk back around the side of the building to join the back of the huge queue, only to hear a TV bod (possibly a 'runner' or a 'fluffer' or something) proclaim that from 'this point on' (200 people in front of us), the show was full.
Thank you very much. Please come again.
Double arse. It seems our ticket was on a first-come, first-served basis. Ah, how naive we were...
We contemplated the pub, but then made a split-second decision to join the back of the HIGNFY queue again and try and blag our way in. Genius plan - I'm like that when I wasted.
This worked brilliantly and we were soon past security who glanced at our 'tickets' without noticing they were from the wrong show, though we nearly tried to sneak onto the back of the QI queue as they filed past us into their theatre. Then, disaster, we saw another fluffer counting down the HIGNFY queue and we could see that we were going to miss out again. Quick as a flash we took a show of hands and voted that the dutch guy in our group should go and pretend to be 'foreign' to a nearby security guard and say that we joined the wrong queue and should be in the QI lot.
Bizarrely he agreed, only to be rebuffed by the security guard who placed him in a 'standby' queue outside the main gate. We waved, and waited to put our names down for 'guaranteed' HIGNFY tickets for the next season.
We resigned ourselves to more beers in the pub, when suddenly the security guard came rushing past into the street and brought the dutch guy back past security (even though he was about 20th in the standby queue), grabbed us on the way through and rushed us into the QI theatre. It turned out that 4 VIP guests had failed to turn up, and so we got their seats.
Awesome seats too. :)
I won't say much about the filming, beyond that Stephen Fry is very funny, it takes two hours to make a thirty minute show, and that we're in the one with the question about 'Who had the first driving licence?' The drunken guy laughing loudly is probably me!
We barely had time to get another pint in the pub before I had to dash across London to get a train that was then cancelled, before getting into Bristol at 1:30am on the only other train westwards which unfortunately stopped at the station on the outskirts of Bristol. I had no cash on me to get a taxi so had to stop at the cash machine to stock up and promptly missed every single taxi.
Triple arse.
So, there I am, standing in a freezing cold car park at 1:45am with a banging headache kicking in - and I had to be at work in 7 hours - when a entirely random posh couple came *back* in their taxi and offered myself (and the other stranded person, a completely wasted oldster in a bow tie) a lift. They were on their way to their 'club' in Posh Bristol (at 2am, wtf?) so were going near my house.
I then had a very interesting conversation all the way back with this seriously minted couple (the bow tie wearer, when asked what sort of day he'd had, had replied in a bemused tone "I honestly couldn't tell you" and then fell asleep) who'd been in London to see the opera and 'spend some money at Harvey Nicks'.
I got to sleep at 2:15am. Top day :)
Friday, 5 June 2009
Please correct me, but...
...a pub should not give you bronchitis.
Should it?
I stopped being ill last week. I've had no cough. At all.
I spent this lunchtime in the pub (no cough) because of a leaving do. I spent from 4pm until 9pm in a pub (no cough) because of a leaving do.
I spent 3 minutes in a bar down the road from the above-mentioned-pub before I start coughing.
Not just a cough, a hacking cough.
*cough* *cough* *Cough* *cough* *cough* *Cough* *COUGH* *Cough* *COUGH* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *COUGH* *Cough* *Cough* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *COUGH* *Cough*
Me: "What the fuck is going on?"
Other people: "Die heretic sinner!"
After 45 minutes of almost non-stop coughing I left to go home. Within a hundred yards I'd stopped coughing.
How can one pub give someone bronchitis? Answers on a comment, please...
Should it?
I stopped being ill last week. I've had no cough. At all.
I spent this lunchtime in the pub (no cough) because of a leaving do. I spent from 4pm until 9pm in a pub (no cough) because of a leaving do.
I spent 3 minutes in a bar down the road from the above-mentioned-pub before I start coughing.
Not just a cough, a hacking cough.
*cough* *cough* *Cough* *cough* *cough* *Cough* *COUGH* *Cough* *COUGH* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *COUGH* *Cough* *Cough* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *HACK* *COUGH* *Cough*
Me: "What the fuck is going on?"
Other people: "Die heretic sinner!"
After 45 minutes of almost non-stop coughing I left to go home. Within a hundred yards I'd stopped coughing.
How can one pub give someone bronchitis? Answers on a comment, please...
Thursday, 4 June 2009
The truth will out...
Yay! Everyone party like it's, um, 2009 because it's time for the annual humiliationfest called...
Red Squirrel's Football Prediction Results!
Seeing as this blog is less than a year old, I'm referring to the predictions I posted on my last blog - they can be found here
So, let's see how I did:
1) Manure will win the league IF they buy Dimitar Berbatov (the moody, sulking wanker) from Tottenham.
They did buy him from us, and they did win the league. Score one for Mr. Squirrel :)
If they don't then I feel they will come a very close second to....2) Chelski yet again, though Big Phil will take enough time to adjust to club football again that a small towel will cover Manure, Chelski and...
Well, I did say it would be close! Surprisingly, Liverpool improved more than I was expecting and just pipped Chelski into second place. I was close but I don't think I can claim a point here. Maybe half a point ;-)
3) The Gooner Scum, sadly. Despite having a tiny squad and no defensive depth at all I get the horrible feeling they will come close to winning the league - falling short like an american swimmer only because of a spring injury to one of Fabregas, Gallas or Adebayor.
Arsenal (The Gooner Scum) did much worse than I expected and came a distant 4th, 11 points behind Chelski. Fantastically, Arsenal doing badly makes me happy so I'll joyfully not get a point for this prediction! How many seasons with a trophy is it now? 4? Ouch, that must huuuuuurt :-P
4) Liverpool will cement their traditional 4th and will be some way off 3rd as they learn the hard way that Keane is not the creative striker they need alongside Torres.
Well, as I just wrote, Liverpool finished second and not 4th - but I'm claiming a half point for my Robbie Keane prediction. Not only did it not work out but they sold him back to us a mere six months later - and lost £8m on the deal in the process.
5) I've done it before but I cannot help myself this year either - Spurs to finish 5th, narrowly heading Villa and Everton in 6th and 7th respectively.
Yeah, yeah, whatever. I support Spurs - how can I not make a rash prediction? :)
6) Villa to finish 6th then :)
Spot on! I probably deserve double for that.
7) And amazingly, out of the blue like a diving Messerchmitt hiding in some clouds, Everton to finish 7th.
Uuuuuum, no. But they were battling Villa for the 'best-of-the-rest' award which was what I predicted *clutches straws*
8) Mark Hughes of Manchester City to be the first manager to leave a Premiership club (resigning I feel).
Had Manchester City not been bought by the richest sovereign wealth fund in the world then he might have been. Like, possibly.
9) Stoke, Hull and West Brom all to go straight back down.
I'm not giving myself any points for that. Only one out of three correct! :(
10) No team will set a new record for lowest points ever.
I'll take a point for that though! West Brom finished bottom with a respectable 32 points.
11) Spurs to win the UEFA Cup (aim for the stars and no-one will complain if you reach the moon).
I reached for the stars and barely got above the trees. I think we got knocked out in the last 32 after our new manager decided he didn't like visiting 'foreign places'.
12) The Champion's League will NOT be won by a Premiership team.
Ding! Un point.
13) Alan Curbishley to first complain about injuries in November.
He resigned after a mere three games after expressing concern about the size of his squad. Not sure I can claim anything here.
14) Fat Sam Allardyce to be managing a Premiership club by the end of the season.
Woot woot! He was back at Blackburn before Christmas :)
15) The top scorer in the Premiership will be Darren Bent.
Wow, I got some stick for this one! Darren Bent was not the top scorer in the Premiership - he did however finish a creditable 6th (with 12 goals) despite only starting 21 out of 38 games. I wasn't *that* far off.
16) England will lose at least one World Cup Qualifier before Christmas.
Surprisingly not. Capello turned out to be really quite good at getting slightly dim people to kick a ball in the right direction.
17) I will convert someone with no interest in football into a Spurs fan. It will probably take a lot of bribery but will be worth it in the long run ;-)
I'm claiming a point for Mrs. RS :)
18) An unnamed (at this time) Chelsea player will be - at some point in the season - involved in a major newspaper story involving a teenage lady, a £150,000 car and a family size tub of Banana yoghurt *taps nose knowingly*
The press suppressed this one after legal threats. Honest.
19) Kieron Dyer will last a maximum of 3 games before being injured again.
And indeed he was - in pre-season training. He finally returned to action at the end of the season and made one start. Points galore on this one :)
20) Ledley King will start no more than 12 Premiership games :(
I've not been happier to be wrong! Despite having no knees, Ledley managed a creditable 24 starts in the Premiership. Our win ratio with him in the side = 41%, without him in the side = 24%
I hope someone buys him some new knees before next season.
So, all in all I scored 8 out of 20 this year. Better than normal :)
Red Squirrel's Football Prediction Results!
Seeing as this blog is less than a year old, I'm referring to the predictions I posted on my last blog - they can be found here
So, let's see how I did:
1) Manure will win the league IF they buy Dimitar Berbatov (the moody, sulking wanker) from Tottenham.
They did buy him from us, and they did win the league. Score one for Mr. Squirrel :)
If they don't then I feel they will come a very close second to....2) Chelski yet again, though Big Phil will take enough time to adjust to club football again that a small towel will cover Manure, Chelski and...
Well, I did say it would be close! Surprisingly, Liverpool improved more than I was expecting and just pipped Chelski into second place. I was close but I don't think I can claim a point here. Maybe half a point ;-)
3) The Gooner Scum, sadly. Despite having a tiny squad and no defensive depth at all I get the horrible feeling they will come close to winning the league - falling short like an american swimmer only because of a spring injury to one of Fabregas, Gallas or Adebayor.
Arsenal (The Gooner Scum) did much worse than I expected and came a distant 4th, 11 points behind Chelski. Fantastically, Arsenal doing badly makes me happy so I'll joyfully not get a point for this prediction! How many seasons with a trophy is it now? 4? Ouch, that must huuuuuurt :-P
4) Liverpool will cement their traditional 4th and will be some way off 3rd as they learn the hard way that Keane is not the creative striker they need alongside Torres.
Well, as I just wrote, Liverpool finished second and not 4th - but I'm claiming a half point for my Robbie Keane prediction. Not only did it not work out but they sold him back to us a mere six months later - and lost £8m on the deal in the process.
5) I've done it before but I cannot help myself this year either - Spurs to finish 5th, narrowly heading Villa and Everton in 6th and 7th respectively.
Yeah, yeah, whatever. I support Spurs - how can I not make a rash prediction? :)
6) Villa to finish 6th then :)
Spot on! I probably deserve double for that.
7) And amazingly, out of the blue like a diving Messerchmitt hiding in some clouds, Everton to finish 7th.
Uuuuuum, no. But they were battling Villa for the 'best-of-the-rest' award which was what I predicted *clutches straws*
8) Mark Hughes of Manchester City to be the first manager to leave a Premiership club (resigning I feel).
Had Manchester City not been bought by the richest sovereign wealth fund in the world then he might have been. Like, possibly.
9) Stoke, Hull and West Brom all to go straight back down.
I'm not giving myself any points for that. Only one out of three correct! :(
10) No team will set a new record for lowest points ever.
I'll take a point for that though! West Brom finished bottom with a respectable 32 points.
11) Spurs to win the UEFA Cup (aim for the stars and no-one will complain if you reach the moon).
I reached for the stars and barely got above the trees. I think we got knocked out in the last 32 after our new manager decided he didn't like visiting 'foreign places'.
12) The Champion's League will NOT be won by a Premiership team.
Ding! Un point.
13) Alan Curbishley to first complain about injuries in November.
He resigned after a mere three games after expressing concern about the size of his squad. Not sure I can claim anything here.
14) Fat Sam Allardyce to be managing a Premiership club by the end of the season.
Woot woot! He was back at Blackburn before Christmas :)
15) The top scorer in the Premiership will be Darren Bent.
Wow, I got some stick for this one! Darren Bent was not the top scorer in the Premiership - he did however finish a creditable 6th (with 12 goals) despite only starting 21 out of 38 games. I wasn't *that* far off.
16) England will lose at least one World Cup Qualifier before Christmas.
Surprisingly not. Capello turned out to be really quite good at getting slightly dim people to kick a ball in the right direction.
17) I will convert someone with no interest in football into a Spurs fan. It will probably take a lot of bribery but will be worth it in the long run ;-)
I'm claiming a point for Mrs. RS :)
18) An unnamed (at this time) Chelsea player will be - at some point in the season - involved in a major newspaper story involving a teenage lady, a £150,000 car and a family size tub of Banana yoghurt *taps nose knowingly*
The press suppressed this one after legal threats. Honest.
19) Kieron Dyer will last a maximum of 3 games before being injured again.
And indeed he was - in pre-season training. He finally returned to action at the end of the season and made one start. Points galore on this one :)
20) Ledley King will start no more than 12 Premiership games :(
I've not been happier to be wrong! Despite having no knees, Ledley managed a creditable 24 starts in the Premiership. Our win ratio with him in the side = 41%, without him in the side = 24%
I hope someone buys him some new knees before next season.
So, all in all I scored 8 out of 20 this year. Better than normal :)
Sunday, 31 May 2009
Putting the 'fun' into 'fundamentalism'
Let's talk religion, purely because I've not been controversial enough recently. And let's be honest, one thing that unites us all is the knowledge that when it comes to a/the/the many/you-must-be-having-a-laugh-if-you-believe-that-nonsense deity, we know that we can't all be right.
Otherwise where would the fun be?
I'd never want to convert anyone to my way of thinking - after all, if everyone was nice to one another because that's how they feel society should be rather than because of a existential stick, then what would I laugh at on a daily basis?
This is why I love the area Mrs. RS lives in. She resides at the edge of Borough Park (or Boro Park in local parlance), Brooklyn. Borough Park is home to the largest Hasidic Jewish grouping outside of Israel, and it's getting larger at an eye-watering rate.
The average birth rate in Borough Park is - wait for it - 6.72 children per family, and growing.
7 kids per family on average. Jesus. I just crossed my legs, and I'm a bloke.
They have so many kids out of a sense of religious duty. I'd estimate the area to be 90-95% ultra-orthodox fundamentalists. They have their own private militia police force that is called first, their own ambulance service. Mrs RS has a seen a mob kick a mexican man to death because he goosed a Jewish woman. There has been a riot because one of the many Torah 'scholars' (that act as religious police on just about every street corner) saw a non-Jewish couple kissing in the street and was so offended that he - soon joined by others - physically assaulted them.
To quote the font of all knowledge:
Culturally and religiously, the neighborhood is considered one of the most Orthodox in the world. "Many families do not own televisions or attend movies. The children attend yeshivas instead of public schools. Adolescent girls do not leave the house without making certain that their knees and elbows are covered, and at weddings and funerals alike, women and men sit separately to avoid physical contact, as required by religious law."
Add to this that the Hasidic sect basically believes that the second coming of Jesus Christ will lead them into the holy land of Israel. This presents a problem because the state of Israel already exists. Therefore - and I'm really not making this up, I've seen and heard with my own eyes and ears - a vast number of this community will support the destruction of the modern Israeli state to hasten the second coming.
Top notch fundamentalism there.
However they're not all bad. They're incredibly kind to their pets. One of their customs involves treating cats with a reverence last seen in Egyptian times, and many of them will carry their cats around with them at all times. In their hats.
I took a photo when I was last there:
My only question is - how Jewish was Dr. Seuss????
Otherwise where would the fun be?
I'd never want to convert anyone to my way of thinking - after all, if everyone was nice to one another because that's how they feel society should be rather than because of a existential stick, then what would I laugh at on a daily basis?
This is why I love the area Mrs. RS lives in. She resides at the edge of Borough Park (or Boro Park in local parlance), Brooklyn. Borough Park is home to the largest Hasidic Jewish grouping outside of Israel, and it's getting larger at an eye-watering rate.
The average birth rate in Borough Park is - wait for it - 6.72 children per family, and growing.
7 kids per family on average. Jesus. I just crossed my legs, and I'm a bloke.
They have so many kids out of a sense of religious duty. I'd estimate the area to be 90-95% ultra-orthodox fundamentalists. They have their own private militia police force that is called first, their own ambulance service. Mrs RS has a seen a mob kick a mexican man to death because he goosed a Jewish woman. There has been a riot because one of the many Torah 'scholars' (that act as religious police on just about every street corner) saw a non-Jewish couple kissing in the street and was so offended that he - soon joined by others - physically assaulted them.
To quote the font of all knowledge:
Culturally and religiously, the neighborhood is considered one of the most Orthodox in the world. "Many families do not own televisions or attend movies. The children attend yeshivas instead of public schools. Adolescent girls do not leave the house without making certain that their knees and elbows are covered, and at weddings and funerals alike, women and men sit separately to avoid physical contact, as required by religious law."
Add to this that the Hasidic sect basically believes that the second coming of Jesus Christ will lead them into the holy land of Israel. This presents a problem because the state of Israel already exists. Therefore - and I'm really not making this up, I've seen and heard with my own eyes and ears - a vast number of this community will support the destruction of the modern Israeli state to hasten the second coming.
Top notch fundamentalism there.
However they're not all bad. They're incredibly kind to their pets. One of their customs involves treating cats with a reverence last seen in Egyptian times, and many of them will carry their cats around with them at all times. In their hats.
I took a photo when I was last there:
My only question is - how Jewish was Dr. Seuss????
Thursday, 28 May 2009
As I'm now a little bit better...
...I feel the desire to share with you a small story I heard on the radio this evening. This occurred in London, but could've happened anywhere really.
The main protagonist in this story had left her car in the same parking space that she'd parked in for 18 months. On returning to the car one day, she discovered it was missing - and that freshly painted double yellow lines* were painted on the road where it had been. She knew it hadn't been stolen (for the very simple reason that the car battery was in her flat being recharged after going flat) and assumed it had been removed so that the lines could be painted.
It took her three days to find her car, as the clampers hadn't bothered to report it as being in their pound. They then demanded a large amount of money to give it back. Undeterred, the owner demanded photographic proof of her transgression (as one can do by law) and was sent a series of photos of her car parked on the double yellow lines.
She contacted her local MP, and rightly pointed out that the photos must have been faked as the car was undriveable and she had witnesses to this effect. Her MP contacted the council, whom instantly backed down (this whole process had taken two months!)
What had really happened? Well the clampers arrived with the road workers, lifted the car onto their truck, waited until the lines were painted and then put the car back, clamped it for being parked illegally, and towed it away in an attempt to make a vast sum of cash.
I feel justified in summing the whole story up in a word:
Bastards.
*You can't park on double yellow lines in the UK without getting a ticket.
P.S. Mrs. Red Squirrel is coming out of hospital today. Thanks to everyone for the good wishes :)
The main protagonist in this story had left her car in the same parking space that she'd parked in for 18 months. On returning to the car one day, she discovered it was missing - and that freshly painted double yellow lines* were painted on the road where it had been. She knew it hadn't been stolen (for the very simple reason that the car battery was in her flat being recharged after going flat) and assumed it had been removed so that the lines could be painted.
It took her three days to find her car, as the clampers hadn't bothered to report it as being in their pound. They then demanded a large amount of money to give it back. Undeterred, the owner demanded photographic proof of her transgression (as one can do by law) and was sent a series of photos of her car parked on the double yellow lines.
She contacted her local MP, and rightly pointed out that the photos must have been faked as the car was undriveable and she had witnesses to this effect. Her MP contacted the council, whom instantly backed down (this whole process had taken two months!)
What had really happened? Well the clampers arrived with the road workers, lifted the car onto their truck, waited until the lines were painted and then put the car back, clamped it for being parked illegally, and towed it away in an attempt to make a vast sum of cash.
I feel justified in summing the whole story up in a word:
Bastards.
*You can't park on double yellow lines in the UK without getting a ticket.
P.S. Mrs. Red Squirrel is coming out of hospital today. Thanks to everyone for the good wishes :)
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
Sorry...
Now I've got the flu, will update this and emails when staring at the screen doesn't give me a huge headache.
Sunday, 24 May 2009
Because I am still awake....
In my last blog I described how we'd run the catering for the stewards of certain major festivals in 2007. I probably didn't explain how the combination of the wettest summer ever (officially so) and devious business partners drove me to suffer trenchfoot and give me my first minor breakdown.
A sobering - literally - experience.
I was reminded of this recently because festival season is starting soon, and found this amazing video showing exactly what things were like in 2007. Bear in mind when you watch this that we were on site already and served food 24 hours a day during this flooding despite being several inches under water ourselves (we had a raised floor because we're not stupid and tried to plan ahead). We were fucking heroes.
http://www.youtube.com/v/1h2b_PpOWpo
P.S. I realise some of the guys in this video are, well, dicks, but I can't change that. The way water is flooding in to the back of the van is fantastic.
A sobering - literally - experience.
I was reminded of this recently because festival season is starting soon, and found this amazing video showing exactly what things were like in 2007. Bear in mind when you watch this that we were on site already and served food 24 hours a day during this flooding despite being several inches under water ourselves (we had a raised floor because we're not stupid and tried to plan ahead). We were fucking heroes.
http://www.youtube.com/v/1h2b_PpOWpo
P.S. I realise some of the guys in this video are, well, dicks, but I can't change that. The way water is flooding in to the back of the van is fantastic.
Saturday, 23 May 2009
Oops, sorry.
Didn't mean to be cryptic in my last post! I had an astonishingly, amazing evening on Thursday but before I got back to write it up I got a garbled phone message from Mrs. Red Squirrel saying that she was 'in hospital' with a 'fever' and that someone was going to 'operate on her legs'.
And that was all I heard, and I got no reply after that.
To say I was disconcerted would win the the 'Stiff Upper Lip - Reward for English Understatement in the Face of Extreme Fucking Circumstances' award.
I've finally got in contact today and she's very ill in hospital with an infected wound and will be there for several days - incidentally I find the bedside manner of 'had you not come to the hospital then you'd be 99% likely to be dead right now' to be less than desired.
It's a situation that the three and a half thousand miles distance kind of sucks balls. We're hoping this can change before the end of the year....
And that was all I heard, and I got no reply after that.
To say I was disconcerted would win the the 'Stiff Upper Lip - Reward for English Understatement in the Face of Extreme Fucking Circumstances' award.
I've finally got in contact today and she's very ill in hospital with an infected wound and will be there for several days - incidentally I find the bedside manner of 'had you not come to the hospital then you'd be 99% likely to be dead right now' to be less than desired.
It's a situation that the three and a half thousand miles distance kind of sucks balls. We're hoping this can change before the end of the year....
Hmmm
I was going to write a happy and enjoyable tale about my week.
But for certain reasons I won't be doing so.
Hmmmm.....
But for certain reasons I won't be doing so.
Hmmmm.....
Tuesday, 19 May 2009
It's the little differences...
Today I found out that:
"The Met Office says it is too early to tell whether it will be a very hot summer this year, but the signs so far are that it will be warmer than our last two summers and conditions could well trigger its heatwave warning system.
In London, this would mean daytime temperatures had exceeded 32C and night-time temperatures were over 18C degrees. In the North West, it would be 30C and 15C, respectively."
I can't just be me that finds it hilarious that a heatwave in London is at 32C (that's 90F) but one in 'the North West' - a mere 150 miles away - is at 30C (86F)?
Having said that, I can sort of see the point - rumours are that the temperature around Manchester last reached 30C about 100 million years ago when what became England was positioned roughly over the area we now call Oman.
I'm not sure I even want to guess at what is considered a heatwave in Scotland... :)
"The Met Office says it is too early to tell whether it will be a very hot summer this year, but the signs so far are that it will be warmer than our last two summers and conditions could well trigger its heatwave warning system.
In London, this would mean daytime temperatures had exceeded 32C and night-time temperatures were over 18C degrees. In the North West, it would be 30C and 15C, respectively."
I can't just be me that finds it hilarious that a heatwave in London is at 32C (that's 90F) but one in 'the North West' - a mere 150 miles away - is at 30C (86F)?
Having said that, I can sort of see the point - rumours are that the temperature around Manchester last reached 30C about 100 million years ago when what became England was positioned roughly over the area we now call Oman.
I'm not sure I even want to guess at what is considered a heatwave in Scotland... :)
Monday, 18 May 2009
Saturday, 16 May 2009
Yes, I know...
I realise I haven't been posting much recently - a heady combination of nothing much happening (that I can talk about anyway), being very tired and lazyarseitis.
I'm not even supposed to be here today. I'm supposed to be London for my football team's final home game of the season, however Royal Bastard Mail lost my ticket along the way so I couldn't go.
We won though, and I was in no way watching an illegal stream of the game this afternoon. No way at all.
So, seeing as I have an unexpected few spare hours, I shall share a couple of things with you. Firstly, the story of Ireland's most romantic man (courtesy of The Register):
Ireland's 'most romantic man' is complete wanker
Craic'd one off while following women
Ireland's most romantic man has been stripped of his crown following protests that he'd been convicted of "committing two acts which were offensive to public morals and decency", viz; "following women around Galway City in his car while masturbating".
Aidan Clifford and partner Ellen Spence, who met on a skiing trip in 2007, "beat off stiff opposition"* to secure the Irish Wedding Journal's "Ireland’s Most Romantic Couple" title.
According to The Clare People, the pair won a €46,000 prize, which included "a wedding reception in the renowned Parknasilla Resort in Kerry, a designer wedding dress from either Kathy de Stafford in Dublin or Blush Bridal in Belfast and a luxury Sandals honeymoon from Tropical Places".
However, the Irish Wedding Journal was unaware that Clifford appeared last year in Galway District Court where he admitted driving to Galway on his days off from work "specifically to follow women around in his car while fondling himself".
According to the Evening Herald, his solicitor claimed Clifford's lifestyle was to blame and that he was "working himself to the bone".**
The couple currently live in Kinvara, County Galway, but Clifford works in nearby Ballyvaughan, where unimpressed residents queued up to express their outrage. One declared the whole thing a "total disgrace", adding: "My own grandchildren play down in Ballyvaughan all the time. It’s bad enough to think that this man is around, never mind putting him up on a pedestal like this."
Another insisted there was “a lot of animosity here about it. Everybody is disgusted."
The Irish Wedding Journal duly responded by withdrawing the couple's €46k booty. The magazine told the Evening Herald: "The nature of his conviction is entirely incompatible with the ethos of Ireland's Wedding Journal and the competition and we regard his entering this competition in the first place as a breach of good faith on his part.
"With regret we have come to the decision that no prize will be awarded this year."
*Snigger
**Double snigger.
And secondly, someone sent me this on email. Google Street View protecting the anonymity of innocent people superbly:
I'm not even supposed to be here today. I'm supposed to be London for my football team's final home game of the season, however Royal Bastard Mail lost my ticket along the way so I couldn't go.
We won though, and I was in no way watching an illegal stream of the game this afternoon. No way at all.
So, seeing as I have an unexpected few spare hours, I shall share a couple of things with you. Firstly, the story of Ireland's most romantic man (courtesy of The Register):
Ireland's 'most romantic man' is complete wanker
Craic'd one off while following women
Ireland's most romantic man has been stripped of his crown following protests that he'd been convicted of "committing two acts which were offensive to public morals and decency", viz; "following women around Galway City in his car while masturbating".
Aidan Clifford and partner Ellen Spence, who met on a skiing trip in 2007, "beat off stiff opposition"* to secure the Irish Wedding Journal's "Ireland’s Most Romantic Couple" title.
According to The Clare People, the pair won a €46,000 prize, which included "a wedding reception in the renowned Parknasilla Resort in Kerry, a designer wedding dress from either Kathy de Stafford in Dublin or Blush Bridal in Belfast and a luxury Sandals honeymoon from Tropical Places".
However, the Irish Wedding Journal was unaware that Clifford appeared last year in Galway District Court where he admitted driving to Galway on his days off from work "specifically to follow women around in his car while fondling himself".
According to the Evening Herald, his solicitor claimed Clifford's lifestyle was to blame and that he was "working himself to the bone".**
The couple currently live in Kinvara, County Galway, but Clifford works in nearby Ballyvaughan, where unimpressed residents queued up to express their outrage. One declared the whole thing a "total disgrace", adding: "My own grandchildren play down in Ballyvaughan all the time. It’s bad enough to think that this man is around, never mind putting him up on a pedestal like this."
Another insisted there was “a lot of animosity here about it. Everybody is disgusted."
The Irish Wedding Journal duly responded by withdrawing the couple's €46k booty. The magazine told the Evening Herald: "The nature of his conviction is entirely incompatible with the ethos of Ireland's Wedding Journal and the competition and we regard his entering this competition in the first place as a breach of good faith on his part.
"With regret we have come to the decision that no prize will be awarded this year."
*Snigger
**Double snigger.
And secondly, someone sent me this on email. Google Street View protecting the anonymity of innocent people superbly:
Monday, 11 May 2009
Whatever will they think of next?
Just look at this store in Brooklyn:
A store that sells things for 99 cents.
Or more than 99 cents.
Or even, wait for it, less than 99 cents.
Wow! A store that sells things for 'a price between zero and infinity (in cents)'. Radical. Even better, they actually marked each item with a little sticker showing the individual price of the item!! Ker-razy!!
I dream of the day I get to see such a store in poor old England. We lack the technology :(
A store that sells things for 99 cents.
Or more than 99 cents.
Or even, wait for it, less than 99 cents.
Wow! A store that sells things for 'a price between zero and infinity (in cents)'. Radical. Even better, they actually marked each item with a little sticker showing the individual price of the item!! Ker-razy!!
I dream of the day I get to see such a store in poor old England. We lack the technology :(
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
There will be blood. And Kung Po Chicken.
Picture the scene, if you will. Or don't, I'm not going to get all Hitler on you if you choose not to.
But if you do, picture the scene of two young (*cough*) lovers walking arm in arm down a street in the nicer end of Brooklyn, both hankering for a chinese meal on their final day together before parting again.
During their slow stroll past cars holding fourteen people, cars 'customised' by someone colourblind and with a love of Bauhaus, and women wheeling pushchairs holding obese babies counterbalanced with two KFC bargain buckets hanging off the handles, our young lovers rejected the first chinese restaurant they passed for 'serving fish'.
Because our young lovers take all their decisions together. Apparently.
The second, and most definitely only other, chinese restaurant they passed was packed - and with a huge crowd of people waiting to be seated. Undeterred, our dashing male lead walks straight to the counter and asks in his poshest English accent if despite not having a reservation, whether they 'could seat my good lady and I'?
Table for two? Right this way - take your pick of 3 tables.
Um....what? The young couple chose a booth. Then looked back at the packed waiting area glaring at them and realised why. One was a big group that were waiting for a table to be free. The other two couples were too fat to sit in a booth.
Not just fat. Orca fat. Own-orbiting-satellites fat.
Our dashing lead half expected Captain Ahab to come crashing though the front window at any moment to claim his prize - the great white whale.
After they'd ordered, the next table that became free was given to one of these couples. The wife especially was gross, and took up the whole of one side of a table (they had to remove one of the chairs as there wasn't room for her and it) while hilariously one of the waters subtly tested the chair in the waiting room to see if it was broken.
All was fine until the soup arrived, along with three middle-aged women who weren't obese - just that very fat weeble-with-legs look. These three women knew Ms. Blowhole as they'd all lived near each other in a place full of refineries called 'Staaten Oiland' about 20 years ago.
Five looooong minutes of screeched conversation a foot away from our heroes ensued after which a waiter finally pleaded with them to sit down.
In the booth behind the young couple.
The beautiful young lady leaned forward and whispered, "Great, now we get to hear about their entire lives."
"Surely not," our English lead replied, "now they've sat down they ought to shut up."
They did.
For five minutes. Then they did what any sane and conscientious people would do and continued their conversation with Ms. Blowhole at full volume - right across the young couple's table. And what a doozy of a conversation it was:
"Do you remember that house we lived in, back on Staaten Oiland?"
"The one down the street from the one we lived in, back on Staaten Oiland?"
"Yes, that one, back on Staaten Oiland. Well we moved after the neighbour extended his decking past our steps."
"No!" *gasp*
"Yes! We told him, the boundary is up to our front door. Not our steps. It's not how we do things on Staaten Oiland."
"No, on Staaten Oiland we treat people with respect. Do you remember those shops round the corner?"
"Round the corner from the house we had back on Staaten Oiland?"
"Yes, those shops - just down from the house we had on Staaten Oiland. Well they've been refurbished and opened up as shops."
"No!" *gasp taking in almost all the oxygen in the room*
"Yes! As shops, but different ones to when you lived on Staaten Oiland."
For. Twenty. Minutes.
Our young couple had been incapable of hearing each other over this torrent of facts vital to world security and had resorted to shouting at each other. At one point when Ms. Blowhole had stopped long enough to swallow an egg roll whole, our dashing hero commented that talking over other people was a tad 'fucking rude'.
They shut up again for five minutes while Ms. Blowhole inhaled a small lamb and spat out the bones.
"AMANDA! Do you remember Amanda? She lived down the street from that house we lived in, back on Staaten Oiland."
Exit one young couple halfway through the meal. The Staaten Oiland Fat Club* had driven them from their food.
*The first rule of Staaten Oiland Fat Club is 'No fucking lettuce.'**
**The second rule of Staaten Oiland Fat Club is 'No FUCKING lettuce, capiche?'
But if you do, picture the scene of two young (*cough*) lovers walking arm in arm down a street in the nicer end of Brooklyn, both hankering for a chinese meal on their final day together before parting again.
During their slow stroll past cars holding fourteen people, cars 'customised' by someone colourblind and with a love of Bauhaus, and women wheeling pushchairs holding obese babies counterbalanced with two KFC bargain buckets hanging off the handles, our young lovers rejected the first chinese restaurant they passed for 'serving fish'.
Because our young lovers take all their decisions together. Apparently.
The second, and most definitely only other, chinese restaurant they passed was packed - and with a huge crowd of people waiting to be seated. Undeterred, our dashing male lead walks straight to the counter and asks in his poshest English accent if despite not having a reservation, whether they 'could seat my good lady and I'?
Table for two? Right this way - take your pick of 3 tables.
Um....what? The young couple chose a booth. Then looked back at the packed waiting area glaring at them and realised why. One was a big group that were waiting for a table to be free. The other two couples were too fat to sit in a booth.
Not just fat. Orca fat. Own-orbiting-satellites fat.
Our dashing lead half expected Captain Ahab to come crashing though the front window at any moment to claim his prize - the great white whale.
After they'd ordered, the next table that became free was given to one of these couples. The wife especially was gross, and took up the whole of one side of a table (they had to remove one of the chairs as there wasn't room for her and it) while hilariously one of the waters subtly tested the chair in the waiting room to see if it was broken.
All was fine until the soup arrived, along with three middle-aged women who weren't obese - just that very fat weeble-with-legs look. These three women knew Ms. Blowhole as they'd all lived near each other in a place full of refineries called 'Staaten Oiland' about 20 years ago.
Five looooong minutes of screeched conversation a foot away from our heroes ensued after which a waiter finally pleaded with them to sit down.
In the booth behind the young couple.
The beautiful young lady leaned forward and whispered, "Great, now we get to hear about their entire lives."
"Surely not," our English lead replied, "now they've sat down they ought to shut up."
They did.
For five minutes. Then they did what any sane and conscientious people would do and continued their conversation with Ms. Blowhole at full volume - right across the young couple's table. And what a doozy of a conversation it was:
"Do you remember that house we lived in, back on Staaten Oiland?"
"The one down the street from the one we lived in, back on Staaten Oiland?"
"Yes, that one, back on Staaten Oiland. Well we moved after the neighbour extended his decking past our steps."
"No!" *gasp*
"Yes! We told him, the boundary is up to our front door. Not our steps. It's not how we do things on Staaten Oiland."
"No, on Staaten Oiland we treat people with respect. Do you remember those shops round the corner?"
"Round the corner from the house we had back on Staaten Oiland?"
"Yes, those shops - just down from the house we had on Staaten Oiland. Well they've been refurbished and opened up as shops."
"No!" *gasp taking in almost all the oxygen in the room*
"Yes! As shops, but different ones to when you lived on Staaten Oiland."
For. Twenty. Minutes.
Our young couple had been incapable of hearing each other over this torrent of facts vital to world security and had resorted to shouting at each other. At one point when Ms. Blowhole had stopped long enough to swallow an egg roll whole, our dashing hero commented that talking over other people was a tad 'fucking rude'.
They shut up again for five minutes while Ms. Blowhole inhaled a small lamb and spat out the bones.
"AMANDA! Do you remember Amanda? She lived down the street from that house we lived in, back on Staaten Oiland."
Exit one young couple halfway through the meal. The Staaten Oiland Fat Club* had driven them from their food.
*The first rule of Staaten Oiland Fat Club is 'No fucking lettuce.'**
**The second rule of Staaten Oiland Fat Club is 'No FUCKING lettuce, capiche?'
Monday, 4 May 2009
A brief interlude...
....before I get on with the posts that have been sitting around to be posted for a fortnight now.
I posted a couple of months ago about a company football game where one department (staffed with young, regular players - as well as a couple of girls) took on all the other departments (staffed with old, fat men) in a 90 minute try-not-to-have-a-heart-attack 'game' where us old people managed to lose 14-1.
*ahem*
Well last weekend I organised the rematch. They had the same team, whereas I cunningly drafted in a few decent guys to make it an even match. My organising was going swimmingly until five days before the game when our three best players all reported back injured from the weekend's games and pulled out.
Oops.
I cajoled one player out of retirement and two people brought 'mates' along on the day. I've put mates in quotes because our goalkeeper turned up ten minutes before kick-off having not stopped drinking all night and had dragged along someone he'd met in the pub the previous night who 'fancied a game.'
All in all, a recipe for an absolute stuffing. Again.
And indeed, our goalkeeper lasted all of twenty seconds before trying to catch one of three balls he could see - completely missing it - and letting it dribble slowly and sadly into the net.
We managed to get to half-time only losing 3-0. I even hit the crossbar in our one decent chance.
Enter Super Squirrel Manager who changed the team round, put myself out on the left wing (as I was the only person in our team who could still run), reorganised the defence and gave a rousing speech along the lines of 'let's kick 'em a bit and see where it gets us'.
Within five minutes of the restart we'd pulled it back to 3-2, then let in a silly goal, then piled forward and got it back to 4-3. They started to panic and substituted off their only girl and replaced her with a six-foot-four-brick-shithouse of a player.
We pressed and pressed but just couldn't get an equaliser, and then two late goals on the break and an even later consolation for us made it 6-4.
Which I'm sure you'll agree is better than 14-1 :)
Here is actual proof of yours truly lining up a swift punt to the nuts of the player in blue. I even got part of the ball first.... :-P
P.S. My arms are incredibly pasty because I'm wearing a long-sleeved top with white sleeves, my left leg is pasty because I'm wearing a white elasticated bandage to stop my knee parting with a sad 'boing' noise, and my right leg is pasty because I'm very pasty.
I posted a couple of months ago about a company football game where one department (staffed with young, regular players - as well as a couple of girls) took on all the other departments (staffed with old, fat men) in a 90 minute try-not-to-have-a-heart-attack 'game' where us old people managed to lose 14-1.
*ahem*
Well last weekend I organised the rematch. They had the same team, whereas I cunningly drafted in a few decent guys to make it an even match. My organising was going swimmingly until five days before the game when our three best players all reported back injured from the weekend's games and pulled out.
Oops.
I cajoled one player out of retirement and two people brought 'mates' along on the day. I've put mates in quotes because our goalkeeper turned up ten minutes before kick-off having not stopped drinking all night and had dragged along someone he'd met in the pub the previous night who 'fancied a game.'
All in all, a recipe for an absolute stuffing. Again.
And indeed, our goalkeeper lasted all of twenty seconds before trying to catch one of three balls he could see - completely missing it - and letting it dribble slowly and sadly into the net.
We managed to get to half-time only losing 3-0. I even hit the crossbar in our one decent chance.
Enter Super Squirrel Manager who changed the team round, put myself out on the left wing (as I was the only person in our team who could still run), reorganised the defence and gave a rousing speech along the lines of 'let's kick 'em a bit and see where it gets us'.
Within five minutes of the restart we'd pulled it back to 3-2, then let in a silly goal, then piled forward and got it back to 4-3. They started to panic and substituted off their only girl and replaced her with a six-foot-four-brick-shithouse of a player.
We pressed and pressed but just couldn't get an equaliser, and then two late goals on the break and an even later consolation for us made it 6-4.
Which I'm sure you'll agree is better than 14-1 :)
Here is actual proof of yours truly lining up a swift punt to the nuts of the player in blue. I even got part of the ball first.... :-P
P.S. My arms are incredibly pasty because I'm wearing a long-sleeved top with white sleeves, my left leg is pasty because I'm wearing a white elasticated bandage to stop my knee parting with a sad 'boing' noise, and my right leg is pasty because I'm very pasty.
Saturday, 2 May 2009
Bonus Drunken Post!
It's 3:30am and I don't care. I'm up late because it's my girlfriend's birthday and we don't share the same continent so I'm working off island time - kapesh?
So in the true tradition of drunken (yet impeccably spelt) posts, here are 5 things about me I've never revealed before. I reserve the right to delete this post when I wake up tomorrow)
1) I'm allergic to everything. Not a joke either. I have bad eczema exacerbated by cats, dogs, heat, cold, soap, any cleaning product, rubber, anything acidic, anything alkali, anyone coughing near me or potentially existing in the same universe. Basically - it's your fault :)
1a) And when I say 'allergic' - a mere second in the presence of any surfactant will make my skin fall apart, often in real time.
2) I hate boats. I hate anything on water. I struggle to cross bridges. The mere concept on being on water freaks me out. I blame this entirely on a) seeing Jaws aged 8 and b) my Dad dropping me in the Canal de Bourgogne and despite my frenzied pleas to get out of said canal, being denied. I probably can't swim. I'd probably do a Moses if forced.
3) My first real girlfriend gave me hepatitis and destroyed half my liver forever. She did that by cheating on me in our month's 'trial period' after two years of going out. I can never forgive this.
4) I often think the world would be improved by 3,000,000,000 people dying. At least.
5) As a consequence of point 4, I'm not sure I deserve to be in the right half.....
Forgive me.
So in the true tradition of drunken (yet impeccably spelt) posts, here are 5 things about me I've never revealed before. I reserve the right to delete this post when I wake up tomorrow)
1) I'm allergic to everything. Not a joke either. I have bad eczema exacerbated by cats, dogs, heat, cold, soap, any cleaning product, rubber, anything acidic, anything alkali, anyone coughing near me or potentially existing in the same universe. Basically - it's your fault :)
1a) And when I say 'allergic' - a mere second in the presence of any surfactant will make my skin fall apart, often in real time.
2) I hate boats. I hate anything on water. I struggle to cross bridges. The mere concept on being on water freaks me out. I blame this entirely on a) seeing Jaws aged 8 and b) my Dad dropping me in the Canal de Bourgogne and despite my frenzied pleas to get out of said canal, being denied. I probably can't swim. I'd probably do a Moses if forced.
3) My first real girlfriend gave me hepatitis and destroyed half my liver forever. She did that by cheating on me in our month's 'trial period' after two years of going out. I can never forgive this.
4) I often think the world would be improved by 3,000,000,000 people dying. At least.
5) As a consequence of point 4, I'm not sure I deserve to be in the right half.....
Forgive me.
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