Mornings

I think I may have hit on a bit of universal appeal with this subject. I mean, you do get the odd morning person, but I really think they are the exception rather than the rule, and their little  problem is not my concern...

Now, who is responsible for deciding that mornings are when you should get up? I am convinced you are wrong, and since I'm always right, if you would be so kind as to make yourself known, I'll arrange for you to be taken outside and shot, it should be quite painless. 

Think of it this way, when you wake you are invariably groggy, lethargic and still tired, you don't function till you've had some breakfast, a cup or two of coffee and a nice sit down. Some time about 11 am you'll begin to become human and then at about 12 you'll be just about ready to face the day. Still, someone has decided that the universal start time for work is 9 am, nearly everyone in the country has to get to their place of  employment at about the time that truly civilized people are soothed awake by the warmth of sunlight coming in through the window. Where, please, is the rational for this? Where is the sense? The working population are not prepared to function effectively unless they are given the opportunity to ease themselves into the day gently, and the same really goes for their customers, especially if, like me, you work in retail, where people have to travel to get to you.

Have you ever wondered why there are more traffic accidents during the rush hours? Some of you will say; "this guy is dumb! There are more cars ergo there shall be more accidents" . Well, you, dear reader, are so far fucking wrong it's laughable! There are more crashes in the am because the human brain was not meant to function so early, nobody is truly awake enough to be trusted with heavy and potentially deadly machinery at 8.30 of a Tuesday morning, let alone any other day, and in the evening we crash as we are mentally exhausted by the efforts of forcing ourselves awake at an ungodly hour, and maintaining this unnatural awareness for the 8 hour working day. The exhausted and unaware mind should not get involved with traffic, it is simply dangerous.

In any case, I have become convinced, over a number of years, that dawn is something best approached from the other side, as the end to a wonderful night, rather than the start of another day. You truly appreciate the beauty of the world growing light around you and the sun rising when you see it towards the end of your day. Watching the sun rise from Chiswick Bridge or better still Kew Bridge, with Oliver's Island reflected in the Thames is a truly moving and beautiful experience. Or at least it is if you aren't in a foul mood having been forced out of bed by a braying alarm and trussing yourself up in a suit ready to face the working day. And sunsets. Sunsets are a thing to be experienced at the height of your mental accuity, the colors, the light, the ever changing vista is a life affirming experience, best seen while your mind is fully aware and ready to accept it's beauty, not, and I mean NOT, as the first yawn of the evening cracks your face open and threatens to dislocate your jaw.

We waste our lives bound by the convention of a time scheme devised by a fool who had no idea what was best for the human beings he was devising it for... Yes hunting mammoths is probably  best done in daylight when you can see them, and aren't likely to spear your tribesmen in error because there's no streetlight to make them visible. There are no mammoths anymore, so really no need to keep to a stone age timetable. we have street lights, we are civilised, and we really should act like it and get up at a decent hour of the afternoon.

Raise a digit for the new look cock-mobiles

I saw something shocking yesterday, so shocking that I even forgot to take a picture of it!

Those lovely people at Foxton's have redesigned the cockmobile (obviously I'm using the word lovely in relation to Foxton's in the loosest possible sense, they are a bunch of twats, pure and simple).

Perhaps this was in response to my blog, though I doubt it, I think only three people read it, an they all think I'm a bit of a fool. It's far more likely to be in response to the universal derision of the stupid horse racing design they currently sport. I am not the only one who hates it you see.

Anyway, this new design ethos.... How can I describe it? Well Foxton's design department have decided to bring themselves all the way up to about 1989 in modernism terms by producing a digital look. It's hard to describe really, I'll try to find a photo I can add later so you can see it, but if you look at the way the numbers are written across the bottom of your cheque book you'll start getting the idea. The ubiquitous mini has been painted with a series of angular lines of varying thicknesses, just like the writing at the bottom of a cheque, and really rather spookily reminiscent of TRON though in a more muted selection of colors. It isn't as hideous as the old look, but it is just as useful. You'll know immediately that the driver is a bollock crushingly huge twat without having to actually go through the pain of meeting them.

So join me if you will by honoring the digital look by raising a digit of your own in salute to the new design, preferably the middle digit of either hand, I'm sure they will eventually get the message!

Waiting for PS3 games to install...

So I have a PS3. A very cool piece of kit, a better DVD player than anything I have had before, stunning Blu Ray machine, a web browser, media player and a games machine. It does them all superbly (well, perhaps not the web browser bit), but other than the burgeoning adiction to so many classy titles I have one niggle.

It takes forever to install games, or at least seems to, especially when all you really want is some action. There's something to be said for the old days of slap in disc and enjoy, even if the graphics and sound and other abilities weren't available.

Anastasia's face....

At least the current version of it, anyway.

It's been a quiet period in the life of everyones favourite MOR popstrel of late. No singles telling us how she has overcome the nasty side of love and survived, and possibly found love with someone new. No shock horror she's shagging/marring/stealing her bodyguard stories. No, nothing.

Well until she decided to come out as a 40 year old woman. A 40 year old woman who uses botox, and likes it. She thinks it makes her look young.

Nope.

It makes her look stretched. It makes her look plastic. It makes her look doll like in the least attractive possible manner (i.e. like a second rate Barbie rip off from the Woolworths' Worth It toy range). There is, to be frank, an air of the bride of Wildenstein about her these days, and since she's in such denial, well, it's only a matter of time before she too finds it impossible to blink.

I'm sure this means we'll be getting a new album soon , but really I couldn't bear to read the story in yesterdays Guardian. They had a full page picture of her fizzog that kept causing pangs of revulsion. 

Apple announcements...

OK, so I'm a cult member.

I have come to think that it is mean of Mr Jobs and all at Apple computers to design such nice stuff and then reveal it with such fanfare. It has one simple effect, it makes me want to spend a lot of money right now and buy myself all the gorgeous new things.  It's not just the form, oh no, the functionality seems to just jump up and down on everything else too. 

I'll either be very jealous of everyone's new stuff or very poor soon, wait and see!

Pronunciation, it's the key to being understood!

Call me picky, call me a nerd, call me an anally retentive pedant but I hate it when people don't pronounce words correctly. Regional, or even international, accents don't bother me, and I get that what is a bath up north becomes a baaaaath somewhere around Watford, but really some folks really can get my goat.

What I want somebody to tell me is when the diphthong th became optional in the way it's pronounced? I hear people use f, d or v all the time and nobody bats an eyelid (well, other than me) and nobody picks them up on it or corrects them. Well, I hear a few of you say, does it really matter, vere's nofing wrong wiv dat is dere? Well there is! (and not just 'cause I said so!)

Words can become other words, meaning can be lost and confusion can ensue. Imaging being offered a PlayStation Free in Currys only to be asked for three hundred quid when you get to the cash desk. All because somebody chose not to correctly form the word. What kind of car is a free one six i? What is wevver? I understand that you're saying it's raining, but I don't remember this wevver stuff ever cropping up.

CSI Miami, Criminal Scene Investigation's Red Haired Stepchild...

It has been known for me to rather enjoy a bit of CSI, it's one of the shows that the Mrs and I can sit down and watch together, both enjoy, and eagerly await the next episode. However as is so often the case with any show that spawns a franchise, there is one version that stands out like a polar bear in the Sahara in it's unspeakable cackness. Just as Friends (which I hate) had it's Joey (which contrived to achieve the impossible by making Friends look good), just as Happy Days had Joanie Loves Chochie and just as Only Fools and Horses has the cack thing that has Boycie and Marlene in the country (who knows, or gives a flying fuck, what it's called), CSI has it's CSI Miami. Step forward Horatio Caine, and take a bow, for now it is your time to shine.





So what marks the Miami Branch of the franchise out as the steaming mound of shit it so obviously is?





Well, we shall begin with Horatio Caine. Never has there been a character in my memory with a catchpose (think of it as a static visual catchphrase), it is impossible for H, as he is known, to do anything without standing 3/4 on with his head cocked to one side. Look at him as he talks to his colleagues, not looking them in the eye, instead staring diagonally at a random object in the mid distance, watch as he interrogates a suspect looking out the window at a particularly interesting piece of grass, look as he does anything, it's always at a 45 degree angle to the rest of the world. I'm sure having sex with him must be an interesting battle against physical impossibility, as he enters his partner from an incompatibly obtuse angle. He also seems to have an arrestingly annoying way of talking, all disjointed clusters of words, pauses where no pause should be, unless the speaker happens to be a severe asthmatic struggling for breath, yet I don't hear Horatio wheezing. Add to this his habit of using the name of the person with whom he is conversing to start or end every other sentence and we begin to get a picture of what gates me about him. Still this is not all that makes Davis Caruso's acting masterpiece a hateful cock-munch. Oh no. Not at all. Woe betide you if you're a child, for H will patronise you with such totality that it is likely that you will never recover, he will also appear, as if by magic, already in catchpose, from behind other characters and launch into trademark annoying conversation. It's almost as though he's been teleported into place. That is, I'm afraid to say not all that is wrong with him. He has along with all the other twattish behaviour, another odd, and frankly disconcerting habit. Every two sentences H has to remove his glasses and put them back on two sentences later (roughly in time with his use of the coversee's name). I think I may have worked out why though. Mr Caruso has a terrible memory, and cant remember more than twenty words of his lines at a time. The producers realising this struck up the idea of engraving his lines on his ever present glasses, but didn't recon on his long sightedness, which necessitates the removal and replacement of the specs every time he needs a reminder.



Still, that's enough about him, what about the rest of the cast?



Well they're not quite as annoying as H but they still piss me off. We have a medical examiner who insists on having conversations with the bodies. No one knows why, because if she was that good a doctor that the bodies would talk back surely she would be performing life saving surgery every day rather than chopping them up and fiddling around inside looking for the bullet. We have a firearms expert who isn't so bad, until she gets dressed, because she's wearing clothes that are a) too small and b) too hideous to suit her, and, as my wife reliably informs me, has terrible makeup (a feature of all the female characters). We have the generic role CSI, a man who has the haircut of your average soccer hooligan and a jaw clenched so tight that I'm surprised every time his teeth don't burst through his face as they shatter under the immense forces. Suffice it to say, there isn't a single solitary character that you'll like, with the obvious exception of anyone who starts taking pot shots at the team with an automatic weapon.



Aside from the cast there's the methods. The CSI franchise in general has some basis in reality, the investigators follow the evidence to find the criminal, but not in Miami. This is a team with more hunches than Quasimodo's family reunion. It's a case of I think he did it so lets look for the evidence that makes him seem guilty.



It makes it very obvious that it's filmed in Miami though, there's something about the fact that every shot in the entire program is orange from half way up that just tells you it's that special tropical light. Look at these two images, one is obviously London and the other is Miami, it's so obvious...

Or perhaps they resort to stupid manipulation to cover up the fact that the show is almost entirely filmed in L.A. It's just one of those things that really emphasises how bad the series in comparison to the others...