Right peeps, I'm thinking Christmas here. I've just been on the travel sites and I reckon I can get two weeks in China for next to a button and a hair-clip. I need to look at hotel prices now. Two weeks over Xmas might be expensive. And I'll be on call. Hmmm.
Do I do China or Japan? It's about the same price, excepting hotel gubbins.
I was scheduled to go into Wigan this evening with the Vanquisher however it dawned on me that a) Wigan are playing at home and b) Man U are on early evening so the juke box will be verboten. Instead, we're going to see Alex in Manchesatoh. How positively exciting! There's a suitable Homer Simpson quote for this (aren't there for most things?) but it escapes me.
"I've been on your website. It's not funny and it's badly designed. There was no button that I could click to insult you. You might want to think about doing something like that. Just a simple easily accessible button to insult you. Fantastic idea."
I told him I call that the comments button where Maest and Waaarty reign supreme.
London to Manchester: 1hr 6mins, down from 2hrs 7mins.
That amount of time is less than my commute most days. You'll be able to pop down for the evening or commute to work in Londinium (should you be so masochistic).
Sorry for the staccato bloggage but I'm grabbing moments here and there.
Well, the news this morning was pretty shocking. I didn't watch the West Ham vs Millwall game last night but by 'eck do I know about the proceedings. I never thought I would see that level of oikishness at a football match again. Truly sickening. I have to ask though, is naming one of the stands at Upton Park The Doc Marten Stand not just a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Someone made a good point on the radio this morning: the last time we saw this, were we not in the middle of a deep recession and wasn't everyone in the country thoroughly hacked off with Thatcher and her cronies. Food for thought.
To compound the bombshell, I fear I will be going to bed without Rachel Burden tonight (phnrr, phnrr). Apparently what's-his-face Bacon is on the radio from some comedy show somewhere.
On the plus side, one of meetings was canceled leaving me only a single 2 hour trip into tedium.
One of the best bits of doing a day working from home is being able to have the radio on. It has pleased me and incensed me in equal measure today.
The bad bit is Victoria Derbyshire's music review. Good Lord. What a din. Today is the first time I have had the misfortune of hearing Dizzy Rascal. Truly dire. Also, Arctic Monkeys -- fail.
The positive is Freddy's press conference. You just cannot help but like the guy.
The Vanquisher and I went into Wigan yesterday. It used to be £1.70 for a single for the luxury of sharing a vehicle with abundant legions of oikagery for four miles. It is now £2.50. That is half a pack of snowts. Outragement.
Today, all is well with the world. We sat and watched the Ashes reclaimed after a liberal dose of Spooks.
I've also ignored taunting emails about the donkey scoring. My view on him has not changed and it never will. A five nil routing of Wigan is all well and good but to have someone with so little talent on your team is truly abhorrent.
You will all be ecstatic to know that our barmaid in the Tudor is in good fettle. I might argue better than good. I have the Vanquisher here as I type and his words are \"Not right. Should be against the law to be so good looking. She can knock a man stone dead at fifty paces\".
I have been ignoring El Bloggo for a couple of days. I did intend to rant about something yesterday but, strangely, some work broke out. Can we say sub-optimal? Yup.
I may have a visitor later on that is not the Vanquisher so I need to do a bit of housework. I twittered something to the effect of \"To hoover or not to hoover. That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler to suffer dust and bits of gubbins...and all that jazz\". That is not the half of it. Due to some clumsy work by the Vanquisher late last night, there is a bit o'polishing to be done too. And then there's laundry that needs stuffing into wardrobes.
And then there's the cricket.
Thankfully the Telegraph crossword yielded easily. I'm surprised that Pater is not done with it yet. He gets up at 06:00 every day. I got up at 11:00 this morning and it was duly dispatched by 12:00.
In other unrelated news, I received an email from Dr Maest yesterday that read:
Just been to see my solicitor, and he asked whether I thought it was time that Rooney went to play with one of the bigger teams? Any thoughts?
My initial reaction was to point out the eternal comma/and debate but it quickly evolved into anti-scousism. My heart was warmed by Dr Waaart's response that predicted the donkey being injured for most of the season apart from the game when Utd play the scousers and he without a banjo manages a double hat-trick (how on earth do you spell that?). I know. I'm deluded. There is more of a chance that I will end up in bed with Scarlett Johansson this evening than *it* scoring a goal. As one of mi'learned colleagues said after the Burnley game, he doesn't just miss the goal, he misses the ball.
Crap. Time to do some work. But this pointless waste of bandwidth post can only end on a high...
Before I prepare my jasmine tea and go to bed, I have a couple of things that I urgently need to get off my chest.
The curse of the donkey has struck the Old Trafford faithful. This is not Ronaldo going but Satan's banjo player arriving. He is a scourge. He is a blight upon anything he touches.
There was a sequence of events en-route home tonight that nearly sparked war. Radio 5 were doing one of their little soundbite clips for the football where some moronic feckwit pundit said "Signing of the season? <that name>. He was FREE!" in a deluded, maniacal manner. At the same time as that was happening someone cut me up in the outside lane of the M60. I saw red. For several moments, I honestly thought about blowing past him in the middle lane and just side-swiping him straight into the central reservation.
I've never been to anger management classes but perhaps I should. The Waaart is probably the only person who has seen me go ape-shit. It is not pretty. Tonight I could have killed. Then I arrive home to find out that it's not even on the TV and have to sit hitting refresh while the feckin' idiot does what he does best. I jested that he may develop cancer of the sock. I hope to all things Holy (and Eric Cantona) that he finds a lump in his sock tomorrow morning and is ruled out for the next three lifetimes. In fact, let history erase him from any records. I don't want future generations looking upon him even sympathetically. Rob, screw Bon Jovi, Kylie, Clarkson, Oddie and the rest. This man must be vanquished. Sort it, afore sundown Friday if you will.
Nski, if you are reading this (and I know you might be), you are permitted to comment on how perfervid in my hatred I have been about the donkey since the day we met. I think I spent half our first week together frothing at the mouth about how crap he was, and you smiled politely while telling me you thought he was cute.
I wanted to say so many other things tonight but I am incensed. Why would you start with someone who shouldn't even make a Sunday league side when you have the Berb? Alex has lost it, and I have lost it more as a result.
First off Kenny, computery diagrams are all about Vishnu so make sure they are gorgeously done. I have the power to give and take. In this case I have a tendency to give but that's because I've had quite a nice day. Don't always assume that.
Second I notice your maligning of that workhorse, the donkey. I created them to be your friends, not unlike golden retrievers. Be kind to your flat headed friends for that donkey may be somebody's parent or, in this case, one of your front-line strikers.
Third, I have been listening to your "tweets" and you have pleased me greatly with your defense of green and white tea (not stripey tea which is God's bag) and although you are pleasing me, your reluctance to share the wealth with your colleagues is to be discouraged. Hand out the nettle tea or have a thousand purulent arses dispensed to your abode via UPS (express).
May your sleep be of the just and may you manage to make your Godless diagram of me symmetric.
Peace, hoopiness and a certain smidgin of froodiness,
The fat bloke across the road sits outside the front of his house on a busy road (A49) for hours each day watching traffic. Why? All explanations welcome.
NPower have sent me a statement for the last three months showing what I have paid them by direct debit, what I have used and the difference. Given I run a small data center here I was unsurprised that I had considerably underpaid. I expected a bank giro thing at the bottom saying I owed them £140. But no. The line where it says I am in debt to the tune of £140 says \"For Information Only\". I am baffled. Again, all explanations welcome. If you are an NPower customer, have you seen this kind of behavior before?
Every now and again, I get approached by people wanting to advertise on here. It has happened again today. My first thought is usually \"why would you want to advertise on here?\". I have a hardcore readership of maybe 20 people and a loyal readership of people searching for facts about Kate Silverton's boyfriend and hairdo. Oh, her Bryonyness pops around occasionally too. This is usually followed by the capitalist scumbag in me screaming \"free money\" before I refer myself to the thought I had some moments ago. Then I get all ethical about it. Do I honestly want someone-else's gory code (which will probably not be XHTML compliant) lowering the tone of the place even further for the sake of a couple of quid a month? I never did get the clickstream economy anyway. So as per usual, I gave them a 403. I mean, I've even taken down the advert for Steve's book on the basis that anyone who would be interested would probably have bought a copy three years ago. I think my policy for the future is that I will advertise friends' endeavors should there be any value to them but all else is verboten.
Finally, I have been doing some discovery work for the past couple of working days and it is tedious. When I moaned about this on Twitter/Facebook, McColleague (who started reading this today so I guess we shall start to see some seriously mad Scottish commenting going on soon) said something to the extent of \"I aspire to the level of excitement that is tedium\". <digress> He followed it up by IMing me the following -- \"And now, the end is near and so I face the final snowtage\" -- a reference to the last smoke of the working day. </digress>. You can imagine the comments that are to be expected. After I had finished trawling through crontabs, daemons and some mad French file transfer software called CFT (which uses a squillion ports that are only documented in French), I started to Visio it into something understandable by mortals. As it took shape, I realized I had a fine opportunity to make the diagram look like Vishnu. I hope the humor is not wasted on the people who read my documents but I fear the worst. Maybe tomorrow I'll take out the words that are company confidential and just leave the shapes, screen shot it and post it so you can all see how utterly stir-crazy I get when I'm doing something even more tedious than smiling politely through endless conference calls.
'Tis Monday and I am taking early leave after a bit'o'crap-TV. I sincerely hope your Monday was a tad more exciting than mine. The only way I can imagine a more dull day is if I had to be at a vegan pilates class with Trevor Brooking after work.
In the immortal words of Pater as he once tried to say goodnight in France after a couple of wine-berry juices, \"Bonne Noire\".
There is an insidious little FA rule that appears to have crept into the Premiership. It is an attempt to level the playing field due to the domination of the "big four" for the last ten years or so. It is an unwritten handicap law.
For example, Utd have won the title three years on the trot so each year they pick up another handicap. It started off with Nani who is about as useful as Bruce Forsyth would be on the left wing. And this year, God help me, "He" is there. The banjo-playing merchant of missage proved his colors again today. Rooney gifted him a chance with only the keeper to beat and he managed to fluff it with finesse.
I can feel the life energy fade as I see the primary midget donkey warm up. It's a physical reaction. I had a silver stake, garlic and a bath full of acid ready to deal with the possibility of his appearance but it appears it was no deterrent to Sir Alex in his endless obeyance of the FA.
I dread the day he is not looking at the ball and it ricochets off the back of his head into the net. Naturally, he will have been injured for six months before this could even be a possibility but you just know it's going to happen as soon as he can spend more than 10 minutes without developing cancer of the socks or some such.
I know I am a bad man. I have done some terrible things in my time, like re-home gnomes en-route home from nightclubs, but I have never done anything bad enough to merit this new FA rule. Where will it end? The inner rings of hell have an ultimate penalty which would see me dangling from the nearest lamp-post. I cannot even write the words, but you may guess what I am thinking.
The Waaart may think himself one clever-clogs because he has done some bits and bobs that keep planes in the air, but McColleague and I today devised a whole new mathematical space.
The problem is this:
The building in which we work has a single lift that calls at five different levels. I work on the fourth and the entrance is on the second. So for snowtage* I have to travel from level four to level two. What happens is that the oiks from level five tend to use the lift for their snowtage too so if they have been using the lift, I tend to have to wait for the thing to arrive. Not good. We call this having been oiked.
We got to thinking about oik-space. There is a set of events on the oik horizon that can cancel each other out. As it happens, this event horizon constitutes the existence of either a single set of negative oik movements (i.e. an arrival from level five to level two) in which case the ascent in the lift is oikless, a paired set of oiks where two discrete sets cancel each other out rendering an ascent optimal or the special set of oiks moving from level five to level four (we call that breakfast/lunch) in which case descent is optimized. The combination of all these sets constitutes oik-space.
I know. It needs a bit of work, but we have time and enthusiasm.
Yes -- before you ask, I'm knackered. Today was like a little slice of the place I suspect I am doomed to in the afterlife. Let's hope tomorrow is better. In the immortal words of Inspector Dreyfus \"every day in every way, I'm getting better\". A bit of The Bill and all will be well. Shop first.
* -- snowtage (pron. snoutage) is the act of going for a smoke.
Evening all. Apologies for the lack of mindless twaddle for the last couple of days. I have spent most of them either asleep or tending to pressing work issues. Thankfully, having woken up at about midday today, I can safely say that I feel a great deal better than I have done, although currently I probably do not look or smell my best. That can be fixed.
In terms of furnishing you with random soundbites, I have to start with Alan Duncan. You will recall I fisked him something awful when he had the audacity to be so rude to Shelagh Fogarty a few months ago. My hits went through the roof as Radio 5 linked to me. Well the interbred little oik has been at it again. Poor dear MPs cannot possibly survive on the "rations" that are £64k a year. The little puke is shadow leader of the House. He will be in a cabinet position after the next election over my dead body. I swear I could be found with a smoking gun stood over his lifeless corpse, screaming "I'm glad I shot the bastard" and there is not a jury in the land who would convict me of anything more than the use of foul language.
The bloke is a scourge on morality. I say "morality" in the non-biblical sense. I know he's gay but I do not discriminate when someone is a twonk of the first order. He's an idiot, period, with no appreciation of lives outside his Oxbridge cohorts' circle.
After his little prima-donna act with Fogarty where he asked her "are you a serious journalist?" live on air, his cards were marked. I wrote him a very reasonable email saying that his behavior was intolerable and, unsurprisingly, got no response. This latest fail consolidates my position on him. Rob, top of the list if you would be so kind.
Moving swiftly on, what the hell was Hillary Clinton thinking when she chose to have a psychotic episode in DRC? You can get free anti-psychotics in the US. I'm sensing a bit of Napoleon syndrome there except extrapolated. She could have dealt with that with a one-line humorous retort but instead chose to show her true colors. Schoolboy error if you ask me. Rob, the list gets longer. Even Rummy had wit.
Finally, why is my Sky listings service not working today? It worked yesterday and it works for tomorrow. I should get someone to google that for me. Resets have not helped. I am bereft of a TV guide. This is probably no bad thing if I forget that England are playing tonight.
The sight of The Donkey™ in a Utd shirt made me weep tears of blood. It is the first time I have seen it and although I thought I was mentally prepared, you could just have stuck a knife in me for the scream of horror that echoed around Wigan. I have witnesses to attest to my pain. About 75,000 I expect.
If he had scored the winning goal, I would be in an ethical hell. I so want him out of the running that I will probably not sleep tonight. I am not being selfish here. I am thinking of the greater good: the world cup. If he gets lucky, talk will again shift to an England return. This cannot be countenanced at all.
As it happens he didn't so I can put the nukes away for a couple of weeks.
It is truly awful to be a Mancunian at the moment.
I never read any of the Telegraph other than the news part. The rest is pointless twaddle that will eventually lead to the print press demise. I get half a rain-forest every Saturday. There are so many sections I couldn't even name them. Who the hell reads the motoring section? Can you think of a duller read? I'm struggling.
It's Friday night and I don't have to think about work until, erm, midday tomorrow when I will have to start doing what I should have been doing all week rather than running the interference that I have been doing. First job tomorrow is to go and fix Pater's computer -- something that will take me 10 mins when sat in front of the screen but a lifetime over a phone (I lost my tech support skills a long time ago -- I cannot even remember how to administer XP let alone Vista).
The question for the rest of the evening is do I:
a) Sit on the sofa listening to Stina Nordenstam in a state of rarefied awe
or
b) Go to bed with radio 5 on, while they dissect how awful the cricket was.
I guess the washing machine is still going so listening to some Stina for a while is the best bet.
The Vanquisher and I saw an interview with Stina the other night where she explained her concern that people would not like her voice. As far as I am concerned, she has nothing to worry about. She's pitch perfect and I know some people will find her tone a little too sickly (I'm looking at my brother here -- i.e. she is not Wayne Hussy) but if you liked the Cocteau Twins, you'll love her. I refer the jury to the evidence I gave some days ago (Crime).
And at this point I realize I am babbling like a babbling brook so will just kick back until the spin cycle finishes with Stina on at volumes that will make the fat bloke across the road resonate in his bed. If the harmonics are right, we might have a major scientific discovery on our hands.
I just had a random visit from the lass who used to be in this house before I was, someone I have known since I got back from the US and who I regard as being top. I had kind of jokingly invited her to pop round on Facebook seeing she was at a loose end, thinking she wouldn't but hoping she would.
For every crap day you have, there is some measure of reward. It was lovely to see you Emma, and feel free to call whenever you feel like it. My latest party trick is microwaving lasagnes -- I shall stock up. :)
This will be quick because I have had a hell of a day while running at probably 70%.
You know those days when something major crops up and suddenly there are calls coming from everywhere and the man at the top of the tree wants everything done before he wakes up the next morning? And then other little things crop up too and you feel like you have to help because you can? Well today has been one of those. During the course of it, I've stepped on a couple of toes too so now while thinking I have broadly speaking done a super-duper job, I'm being paranoid and focusing on the bit that I think I dropped a proverbial one on. Apart from other larger weaknesses, that is my biggest one -- the ability to sweat the small stuff. I should just forget about it until tomorrow but obviously won't.
Gah. Must stop thinking about all the clever-clever I could have applied had I been 100%.
Time for some zoning and Stina. Must shut down email tab.
For those of you that don't know, there's an Aussie cricketer called Graham Manou. Lloydy just got all inventive and sang "mna mna" using his name and then went through the whole song live on air.
The man is a national treasure and should be knighted forthwith. That was utterly inspired.
They're kind of like Roy Harper's Macgoohan's Blues except not quite as melodic.
I still feel like several orders of pants, but I was up at 05:30 and in work for 07:10 where I was greeted by a backlog of email that would make your mother cry. I don't even know where to start.
This mornings only saving grace is that Rachel Burden was on Breakfast. God, I could listen to her forever.
Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
-- Edith Sitwell
373486 glorious calls to prayer (okay, hits) since 2nd September 2003
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