More of the same

Cocks....

Yup there is another big one around here.

Behind my home, just past the annoying revving bike is a nursery school.

Now it seems to me that if you send your children to most nurseries they will be looked after and educated by young female slightly overweight chavs. Nothing unusual there, though it may not be ideal in the posher bits of the world. There's a fair sprinkling of these chavs in the nursery behind me but they don't annoy me any more than any other average chav.

No

There's one special one. The one who teaches them sports. This is one annoying shouty man chav. And he's S T U P I D too.

Now he comes dressed as the worst kind of chav. A haircut with bits trimmed from it to look like partings, but being as he doesn't have afro hair he can have a normal parting, just by parting his hair. A polo shirt "wiv a coller so it looks smart innit?". 3/4 length trousers, adidas ones, capri pants for male chavs, though worn with a certain panache, this guy actually takes the bits of string at the bottom of the legs that can be used to gather them around the calf and uses them to gather the fabric about his calf (no one has done this since the design team at adidas tried to justify their jobs by adding these useless bits of twine (look Hans ve can gazzer zer vabric, ist gut ja?)). Worse still he gathers the fabric just below the knee, it makes his chav wear look like what I'm told are called Harem pants, but what I think of as the kind of thing worn by female belly dancers, genies and the like, only with stripes down the side. Oh and shoes, well you know those really thin trainers that chavs all wear these days? The ones made of leather that seem to have zero padding? Yeah? Well imagine them made of even thinner leather, and then divide the thickness of the leather by two. It looks like he's painted his feet white, in fact, the only way to tell the difference is to look very closely for the stitching, though I'm reasonably sure that he'd draw the stitching on his feet if he could. If he could work out which end of the pen is the one that writes.

Clothing over.

Stupidity time.

Imagine holding a conversation with a bunch of three year olds. Now imagine having to talk up to them intelligence wise.

When this fully grown man asks them to show him their balls it's not checking that they understand, it's not a pedophile in paradise, it's a man who has genuinely forgotten what balls look like. There's a look on his face for a moment like "ah yes, I remember!" shortly followed by blank incomprehension, then the question again, then the look........

Here is a man who has so little understanding of how the world works that he tells the children to "drop their balls downwards (said daaahhhhnwads), towards the floor," . He's genuinely worried that if the children let go of the spherical objects they hold (what are they again, oh yes, balls!) that they could float off in any direction. He is unaware of gravity, Isaac Newton is a mythical character who invented feet, and science does not exist. He also feels the need to remind himself (not the children) that downwards is, in fact, towards the ground, just in case he forgot. He is DUMB!

No worse still is the fact that he does all this at a volume roughly equivalent to a 747 at take off. His annoying chavvy voice reverberates off the nearby buildings causing all who hear it to shudder.

Except for the chav girls who work at the nursery. To them he's hot.

It's time to talk about dicks...

There are some big dicks in my life. Being as one is attached to me, and is therefore great, I'm going to talk about the others.

Dick number one is the reason I shall never need an alarm clock as long as I live here. To be clear, I live above a shop, and said dick works in said shop. Said dick owns a motorbike. Every morning this phallic appendage travels to work on his bike, he probably has a zippy, nippy, journey untroubled by traffic, his gleaming leathers unsullied by dirt. He arrives at exactly five to nine each day and parks his bike below my window. My bedroom window. The window behind which I am asleep.

Now bikers can be, and often are, very cool guys. You can spot the cool ones. They'll be wearing the battered leathers and be riding bikes that sound manly and deep throated. The cock downstairs is not one of these. His leathers a bright shiny and new. I am sure that he makes the attempt daily to iron creases into the legs of his leathers, so as to look smarter. He follows ironing blogs looking out for the invention of the biker leather iron, and already has the funds saved in his high interest instant access ISA savings account to purchase one. In fact he's probably funding a development program as we speak...

Now a biker in new leathers is often the possessor of a crap bike. I don't know what bike this chap has, he makes sure it's covered up with a little silver blanket to keep it nice. It looks like it's just run the London marathon. I do know it sounds shit. It sounds like a hair dryer being amplified through a megaphone with a cracked horn. Only worse. And louder. I know this because every day he jars me from sleep by revving his motor three times to the redline before turning it off. Vriiiiiiiiiiiiiiimmmmmmmm Vriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimmmmmmmm VRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMMMMMMMMMMM! (not vroom, that sounds too much like a proper bike....).

What purpose does it serve? Does it make it go faster when he leaves of an evening? Or is it just to say "Hey people I'm HERE! Look at ME! Aren't I just the COOLEST because I have a MOTORBIKE?". Well its obviously the latter.... what he doesn't realize is that people are saying "Oh fuck HE'S here. Again. What a FUCKING COCK! Go buy a REAL BIKE!".

The guy's a massive dick.

Since the recession has begun I have noticed a new breed of customers appearing in the store where I work. This new species shall be the subject of tonight’s rant.

These people seem to have the idea that we owe them something, simply because they have come to us to buy something, that we should acquiesce to whatever stupid request they make simply because they have some money that they would like to spend. These people are stupid. Very stupid. Very stupid indeed.

Think about it...

Every single one of them comes in and chooses a product that is a) very expensive and (NOT or) b) very heavily discounted. They will then ask for more money off. We are not talking £5 or £10, a sensible amount, a figure that, should the day have been quiet, I may consider. What they will ask for is £100 off a £600 product.

They will be told that this is not possible.

They will then demand that we give them something of greater value than the original discount requested for free.

They will again be told that this is not possible.

At this point a strange cross between anger and utter incredulity will cross their face.

“Don’t you know that there is a recession?” they will sputter. “Don’t you realize that you should be grateful I’m even here? Do you not think that if it were not for me, just me, you would be out of a job by the end of the week and the company would go the way of Woolworths? Don’t you care that I will walk out of here and spend my money elsewhere?”

My answer is no. A firm and unequivocal no.

Yes I know there’s a recession, I am glad that we have customers, but really if the business relied on you and your overactive self importance gland for our income we would have been fucked long ago, and should I lose my job because I failed to sell you this for a ridiculously low price, well I’m probably well shot of it, and no I don’t care if you take your money elsewhere because I know that if some fool does give you the price you are looking for then their business IS going bust, pretty damn soon and they, not I, will be out of a job.

Look at it mathematically. An item costs my employer £550 to buy, it normally sells for £800. A profit of £250. Because there is a recession, and because we need to keep trade the item is reduced to £600, it does not cost any less. £50 profit left.

Now a ‘customer’ comes in and demands £100 discount. How much profit is left? Fuck all. In fact I’m virtually paying them £50 to take it away. Where, pray tell, is the sense in that? How is it a good idea, recession or no recession, to sell something for less than it costs to buy? Why, for goodness sake, do these so called saviours of business during the recession not grasp that it’s not going to get us anywhere if we don’t make a little profit on what we sell?

I get that they are just out for a good deal, much as I am when I shop, but there are good deals and there are stupid deals. Ask for the stupid deal if you will but for fuck’s sake don’t get all pious and offended when you’re rejected. If you do, well then you’re an arsehole and, therefore, I hate you.

Lost...

I like answers. They kind of give a solution to the problem of not knowing what the hell is going on.

I  like Lost. It's a well made and intriguing TV show that has actually managed to keep my interest for the four seasons I've watched (unlike 24 which kind of bored me after 2.4 hours).

The problem I have is that the two things are mutually incompatible. 

Series 5 has just started. I was told I was going to get answers.

Bollocks I was!

The English...

...or at least the ones who are proud of it to the extent of xenophobia.

I am fed up, quite frankly, with a certain type of English person. Not the Englander as perceived by the rest of the world, the reserved, polite, well spoken individual. They're OK. It just seems that they aren't the English any more.

No.

We have people who believe that Sportswear is the ultimate in cool. That an England football top is the height of fashion (for men OR women) and is something to be worn at every opportunity. That a St George's Cross hung from a window is a viable form of exterior decoration for a home. That St George's day should be a national holiday, despite the fact that the bloke was a Turk and never visited the country, oh, and the fact that were no dragons, ever, he didn't kill one, save a princess or do anything he may be associated with in the minds of the people in question. That being pure bred English is possible. That we have a had a proud history of independence. (The Romans, the Vikings, the Saxons, and the Normans? Anyone? English? Or Roman, Norwegian French crossbreed?) That football is the defining reason for living. That the Sun is a newspaper. 

I live in a deluded nation. Surrounded by people that have a word picture formed by reading the Sun from back to front (that way comes in the order of importance, sport (just football) adverts for porno phone lines, problem page, womens shit, more football (if you're lucky) celebrity gossip, page three boobies, major story (so long as it's about football celebrities or sex)). People who are tattooed with bulldogs, phrases of absurd patriotism (Im forever english (captalised and punctuated as on the arm of the subject). It's disappointing. I could be proud of our nation, but I'm embarrassed by it. Visitors arrive expecting Hugh Grant and get Chavs. They get yobs. They get one of the most fucked up nations on the face of the planet.

This isn't inspired by my Scots heritage. 

The Scots are a pretty fucked nation too. Governed by the sassenachs as my brother would say. but really, it's the same problem. Chav or Schemie... the difference is in the name the scum are given.

If only the country was the way the outside world believed it was...

If

If is such a hateful, shitty little word. Not all the time of course. Sometimes it's useful.

It's NEVER a word I ever want to hear again when it comes to hindsight, to things that can never be changed, to things that, frankly, have gone. It does not matter at all, in the slightest, not even microscopically what would have happened should another path have been chosen at some precise point in the past. It can't matter. It is not important. The reason? You're actually stuck with the consequences of the path that was taken. Imagine that. No time machine to take you back and change your mind. No way of stopping the events that forced a path to be chosen. Who'd've thunk it? You're actually stuck with your past. Now there's a concept!

I could do without hearing "Well, if he hadn't...." or "it would be better if you'd never...." or anything of the sort. Pointless speculation on the past is just exactly that. Pointless. As in something with a total lack of a point. An absence of narrowing protuberances. NO POINT. 

Speculate for all you're worth on WHY something happened, on HOW it happened. These can be worthwhile endeavors. They can teach you how to avoid mistakes in the future, they can show you how to do it better next time. If, after the fact is worth nothing.

So what peeved me today? 

An article in The Sun (Bleah, I read the Guardian, no-one reads The Sun, they look at the pictures and try to cobble together a meaning) about Prince Harry's "Racist Abuse". (Why the inverted commas? Who knows if it's racism, really? It's probably the stupidity of the inbred. Add to that the fact that it DOES NOT MATTER. It will not stop the recession or global warming if Harry called him anything else, and frankly that's what really matters on a global scale right now, isn't it?). This article speculated on the fact that Harry would have been a more pleasant chap IF his mummy, the not all that attractive and media manipulating Princess Di would have lived. SO FUCKING WHAT? She's not alive. She is dead. There is no Diana (despite constant press coverage in the Daily Mail and the Express, papers who give her far more importance in death than in life). It does not matter what the world would be if she was still here because, incase you haven't noticed, she isn't. Harry is the product of his past, of a system so institutionalized and inbred that it would be surprising if he were a rounded individual, rather than a fag smoking self important toff who thinks he's above reproach.

If, as a concept sucks.

So, it's been a while since I actually seemed to hate anything. At least to you. Life's been getting in the way, in a way that quite frankly has kept me so apoplectic with suppressed rage that... well... I could have exploded.

In any case I'd like to rant about coughing. Coughing is something that currently I am intimately familiar with. Hack! Grunt! Hurrrrggghhhh! Splutter! I've been at it for about a month, and I'm not the only one, my wife and daughter are at it too. My life has been one hack after another since before Christmas. 

I'm starting to get just a little teensy bit fed up with it. It is starting to spoil everything. It wrecked Christmas for a start. I had the flu, so did my daughter and it turns out my wife had the measles. I helped cook some of the Christmas dinner (which could have been a disaster) my wife spent half the day in bed and the other half curled up shivering on the sofa, and if it hadn't been for the fact we had guests we would have put off the entire day. Since then we've all started to feel better but the coughing hasn't stopped. 

It's like having a constant accompaniment from the least enjoyable percussion section in the universe, and it's  a percussion section that have chosen big clubs to hit their instruments with, forgotten their instruments and then chosen you as a replacement. It's like getting beaten up on inside. All. The. Time. It has gotten so bad that I seem to have hurt my hamstrings. Thats right. I have hurt my legs, with coughing. My chest has hurt the tendons in my legs. A cough has given me an injury common in footballers and sprinters. It's gone beyond the point of normal. It's gone beyond normal and out the other side into impossible. I'm a deeply unfit creature (I should work on that) with a sports injury, all thanks to a virus. 

Bugger it.

Bugger it all to heck! 

People who's opinions are defined by others.

Everybody has a mind, it's a freebie, get born, get a free mind that you can use to make decisions. It's an easy thing to use, every time you need it it's there, helpfully reminding you to remove the hand you've inadvertently laid in a fire because it hurts, giving you the heads up that the feeling of emptiness in your tummy means you're hungry and letting you decide what pleases or disgusts you, all by yourself. So why is it that there are people around who seem to have their opinions dictated to them from the people around them? Is their mind so weak that it can be dominated by  others on every occasion? Is it the case that they have lost the ability to listen to their own opinions? God knows.

Think about it. You listen to some music, your brain will fairly rapidly inform you wether you are a) enjoying it, this is GROO-VEEE, b) it's doing nothing for you, I mean you don't want to vomit or anything, but you wont care if you ever hear it again, or c) this noise is horrible, it makes me want to tear of  my ears and swallow them lest I hear it again and subsequently go out find the men/women who perpetrated this aural crime and kill them, slowly and painfully. This same simple decision process happens a billion times a day to every one of us... It works with people, smells, tastes, sounds, sensations, situations, in fact everything that happens will form some kind of opinion in your mind that lets you know wether you want it to happen again. It happens subconsciously. You don't even have to think about it and it goes on all the time. So, how can you not pay attention to it? How can you override it, suppress it, ignore it or disregard it to the point where your own tastes cease to matter and those of the people around you inform your entire view of the world? You must be entirely stupid or weak in order for it to happen.

So, there are people I know who claim to be fans of The Kings of Leon, Metallica and Beyonce. Somewhat possible, yes but nearly everyone I know who likes the first two may well think the latter is a visual treat (I don't) but would rather die than listen to her, and of course the other way round does too. I have friends who claim to be socialist, yet think that Boris and Cameron are the best next step for the country. I have many friends who display this dichotomy of opinion and they all have one thing in common, the fact that they have very little will power and strongly opinionated friends (of which I am one) who it seems they must follow or die. It's quite hard to cope with these people. I would far rather have someone with a view of their own, wether I agree with it or not, than a namby pamby yes person. A lively disagreement is as much fun as a sharing of the same view with someone as passionate about the subject as you. What isn't fun is the humming agreement of the non opinioned. 

Please people, tell me what you really think, not what you think I want to hear.

The Holiday Inn Shower situation...

The shower in room 233 at the Holiday Inn, Swindon is quite possibly the worst excuse for a dispenser of cleansing liquid that I have ever been unfortunate to utilise in my entire life.

A shower can be a wonderful thing, an invigorating jet of hot water that urges you into wakefulness and leaves you tingling and fresh. My shower at home is a particularly fine example of this, I can safely say that I have never experienced better. What I expect to get in a hotel is not this, but I do expect something sufficient for my sanitary needs. I expect to be able to get clean, to be able to rinse the shampoo from my hair in a reasonable amount of time. This as you may guess is not what I got.

No. What you get if you are unfortunate enough to stay in room 233 at Swindon’s main Holiday Inn (I can’t speak for the express versions, of which there are unaccountably for a provincial town, two) is a trickle. I am deadly serious here. I have been in drizzle with more liquid force than this shower. I would have been better off attempting to rinse the soap from my naked body (don’t get too excited at the thought, I’m not available no matter how alluring you find the thought of a naked me) by stepping out on a misty morning and hoping the water vapour in the air would be effective. The amount of water the shower produced was roughly equivalent to the level of rainfall in the Sahara in the dry season. This, as showers go, was the most thoroughly disappointing experience of my life. I have felt cleaner after playing rugby on a muddy field than I did after I had this excuse for a shower.

What must be said is that the rest of my weekend at the hotel in question has been pretty good, especially considering it was a reunion of my wife’s family, populated almost entirely by people I think I’ve met before but can’t be sure about, let alone remember their names. I had a good time, and I think I might even come again next year.

Just so long as I don’t have to stay in the same room.

Before I go though I'd like to thank the Wonderful wendy in the housekeeping department who found my daughters missing toy and will be sending it back to us. There are some wonderful things about the place after all!

Universal Truths

So the other day those lovely people at Thames Water cut off my supply by accident. This, of course, made a change from them letting it piss out of ill maintained victorian piping, that has never let me down. Of course, they screwed with my water while replacing said reliably ill maintained victorian pipes.

Anyway on to the universal truths...

1. Your water will be cut off as you are about to step into the shower.

2. The moment it is cut off you will need to urinate and, by force of habit, will flush.

3. 10 minutes later you will need a crap, a crap of the kind that no mortal man has ever needed before, the kind that smells of satan's farts and fills the bowl to a depth hitherto unthought. You will not be able to believe that your body could contain this much waste and survive.

4. Thanks to truth 2 you will not be able to flush away truth 3.

Wednesday was NOT a good day.

Money money money....

I would like someone to explain, if it's at all possible, why urban music, hip hop, so called R & B and the like seems to have an obsession with money. For example as I was watching a video by an ex member of the So Solid Crew the other day on breakfast TV, I was struck by the fact that the entire subject of both song and video was how much cash he could wave around. Destiny's Child have done it too, with their hit Miss Independent, some other bunch of fuckwits spoiled the Bill Withers song Lovely Day by changing it to it's a lovely day I just got paid.

Is this what's important? Is cash better than love? Does money mean more than sex? Is it better to buy a shag than to romance your way into a relationship? Wasn't this all done better at the end of the 80's?

It used to be guns, killing and drugs that dominated the modern end of music, and people were worried that this, along with the rude words would turn our children into a nation of psychotic killers. Well, if the Daily Mail is to be believed (which it very rarely is) it has, as every child in the UK wanders around waving a foot long machete before jabbing it, at random, into their classmates on a whim. The thing is, that isn't really true, knife crime is now more publicized rather than being more common. I find it far more scary that the theme of modern music is greed, the I must have it all and flaunt it culture. What effect will this have on our kids, making it acceptable to behave in brazen displays of false opulence.  I shall remain forever unimpressed by the thickness of the gold chain around your neck, the numbers of gaudy diamond rings adorning your stubby fingers, the flashness of your ride or whip leaves me cold and, no matter how fat the wad of cash you wave at me, I shall not admire you.

As I said, this was all done better at the end of the 80's, Harry Enfield's character Loadsamoney released a single all about his money. You know what, he was an entirely dislikable creation too!

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...

Moonpig.com, possibly the worst advert in the world?

Isn't it almost precisely the most hateful advertisement to disgrace the world of Commercial Television? 

I know I've ranted in the past about the hateful nature of adverts that don't tell you what they're supposed to be selling. The Moonpig ad is definitely NOT one of them. Oh no.... appearing as a perverse form of punctuation are the words Moonpig  dot com. No, in the land of the poorly drawn pig, there are no commas, no full stops, no exclamation marks, just the words moonpig dot com. Imagine that was normal...

Hello mooonpigdotcom I have come to repossess your sofa moonpigdotcom I moonpigdotcom m sorry moonpigdotcom you really should have kept up with the repayments Mrs Smith moonpigdotcom

What's worse is the fact that the words are not said, they're sung, badly. How hard would conversation be if the world really was as it appears to be in these hideous adverts?

Now let's look at what they're peddling. It would appear that all the crummy greetings cards in the world have been collected together in one place, cards just as they were sold in my local post office when I was about seven, with jokes that weren't particularly funny even then. Then of course, being as this is a dot com company they let you customise the cards. Lucky recipient, he or she gets a shitty card and to top it off, his name is there emblazoned upon the cackness. Even more insulting, they  don't even get a card sent personally by the sender, no, Moonpig send it direct to the recipient, removing all effort on the part of the well wisher, kind of the Internet equivalent of the boss getting his secretary to buy all the presents for his family. Thankfully I've never been the recipient of a moonpig card, so I can't be drawn on the quality of the printing, but really I suspect that it's the equivalent of setting your lexmark to draft mode an printing it on a sheet of 80gsm that you fold up roughly square before bunging it in an envelope that you've tucked the flap inside.

The advert works well enough, you see the product, you certainly do know what the name of the company is so it's all boxes ticked in Alan Sugar's book of advertising. Pity it's such a fucking stupid name, I mean what in the name of all things good and holy does moonpig have to do with greetings cards? You could say what the hell does Currys have to do with electrical goods, but there was once a Mr Curry, who flogged the great and good some bicycles and then the odd radio. Is someone going to tell me that Mr Moonpig and his wife Millicent have started a company? And no, I haven't heard of the Moonpigs of Nether Wallop, and neither have you. I just looked the name up on Ancestry dot com, and there weren't any. So ner! Worse still, or possibly not worse, but at least just as bad as the name is the logo. Look at it there as it grins at you, the head of a happy pig pickled in a goldfish bowl sat next to the chalk outline of a recently murdered half eaten biscuit, and then drawn by an inept blind man with rudimentary  computer skills using a ZX-81.

Not since the last time an advert pissed me off this much has an advert pissed me off this much, and I can't see it being equalled till the next time I get annoyed by crummy advertising. I'll be glad to see the back of it!

Can I Not get a witness?

I had some visitors at my workplace this week, unfortunately I was a little too busy doing my work to get the opportunity that I so desperately craved to tell them to fuck off. Still they did leave me a couple of useful leaflets that I thought I could share with you... while I take the piss just a little bit.

Hopefully this will come out big enough for you to see some of the things that have annoyed me, if not, well you'll just have to trust me. But first a little background...

According to the witness (possibly witless, not sure), god is getting just a little bit peeved with all of us disobeying his rules, you know celebrating Christmas, having blood transfusions, not bothering people in their homes to join some hokey hokum cult and the like, and he's going to bring the world to an end, and make it all so lovely for all the witnesses while the rest of us burn in hell. So let's have a look at these leaflets as they display their vision of a Witless nirvana... Look at the smiling faces, nobody is unhappy, oh no, but look closer, they are all clearly insane. These my friends are the smiles of the clinically psychotic, the kind of folks who grin as they dance through the blood and wrap themselves in the entrails of their latest victims. These people scare me. Look also as children in the left hand picture stroke lions and feed unlikely bunches of blue flowers to carnivorous bears, clearly the artist has captured the moment before the tranquilizers wear off and the animals turn and rip the arms of the foolish from their sockets, just as the fools in question grin at their luck at living in a world where lions are temporarily sedated just so god's chosen ones can pet them. Of course all the willing victims will die, even if they're saved by the other psychos, because nothing helps a person who's lost a lot of blood as their arm is currently wedged in the digestive tract of a sleepy lion than a blood transfusion, which of course is banned by the god who let them pat the wild predator. I think he has a bit of an odd sense of humor that god chap... 

Then look at the right hand image, there's something wrong there. The Jehovah's witnesses are not a sect known for their ostentatious fashion sense (Prince excepted), but someone told the artist that there was a little product called 'Hair Moose' that women like to use. I think he misinterpreted the concept... just a little. I mean no-one wears an actual ^moose^on their head, do they?