A WEBSITE WITH SOME THINGS ON IT.

        Everyday life in geek land...

24th July

My Subaru Impreza WRX STi Type UK (must be the longest name ever) failed its MOT. My old Volvo with 128,000 miles on it passed with flying colours ironically. Had to spend an afternoon fitting new brake disks, pads and a drop link. Of course the snapped drop link was on the nearside, where all the potholes are. No surprises there then. Our roads really are crap. My poor Audi has 20 inch rims and sometimes I think that the people behind think I'm barmy as I duck and dive round the craters in the road like I'm pissed up.

Foxes seem to have had a bad press lately. It's amazing isn't it? A fox only has to eat a baby and all the papers are suddenly full of 'a fox stole my car' or 'a pack of foxes ate my house'. It prompted a flurry of calls to the daytime talk radio station that I listen to while driving around. People were moaning that one killed all 40 of their hens in one night. Yes, foxes do kill all the hens if they get in, but a hen house is a man made idea. Hens are jungle fowl, they don't construct hen houses in the wild and sit there 40 at a time. A fox doesn't know what on earth it is so he kills everything.

The other thing that made me mad is that if people build crap chicken runs or insecure coops and don't look after their hens. They then moan when foxy slips under their crap wire and kills everything. Luckily before I could get through to the radio station for a rant, a man came on and said exactly what I was thinking. We have at least 2 urban foxes that regularly come trotting through the garden but have never lost a single hen. Why? Because we are not morons.

We recently decided to extend the chicken run to give the chucks a bit more room. It involved sinking ten new posts, and a lot of chicken wire. Unfortunately our ground is the hardest clay you can imagine. It's so hard you could probably make drill bits and lathe tools out of it. Digging ten post holes meant taking it in turns first with an SDS drill with a chisel bit and then with a trenching spade trying to get bits out. needless to say after that day I felt like I had been run over, being a flabby alarm engineer not used to exercise. 

                               This is like digging tungsten. Who's bright idea was this?       Luckily we stuck at it and the chickens seem happy.

                                                                8000 Volts keeps out foxy thanks to a great old 1950's electric fencer.

Ahhhh currant bun!

Well last weekend we finally got a taste of some nice weather. That's great because traditionally our 7 month winter of snow and rain is followed by a five month spring and summer of slightly warmer rain, then it's back to winter.

We usually get crap weather here, and for that reason we are a nation of people who have to be constantly prepared to spring into action and change our plans the very second the weather changes. If it's raining we all go to the nearest retail park and buy a new flat screen TV or PS3, but if the sun is out we all rush to Sainsburys to strip the shelves of anything that can be possibly rammed on a barbeque. I had to sit in my wife's car in town for a while last weekend while she was picking something up (we were on a double yellow line) so I watched the world go by and thought how much the sun changes our streets.

Meat-Heads.

These guys obviously spend hours a day in the gym and never normally get to show their muscles to anyone, except their fellow meat-heads at the gym or one of the numerous mirrors in their council flat. They generally have no necks, read 'Roid-Rage' magazine and live on 3 litre tins of 'Mega-Bulk' powder supplemented with regular injections of something extracted from Bull's scrotums. Their ultimate aim is to look like the guy on the cover of 'Roid-Rage', in other words like a space hopper that someone has managed to insert a full set of garden furniture into. Good weather is their dream, as they can walk around the town showing off their hard-won mass of additional meat. Unfortunately this is not usually accompanied by brain mass. No pain, no brain as they say. (Did I get that right)?

At least these guys actually have some muscle. Unfortunately hot weather is also an invitation for every skinny boy who has done an hour a week on his shopping channel Hunk-o-Matic machine to suddenly don a vest and wander around looking like something from Auschwitz, showing off his matchstick white arms and 13 inch waist. Not nice son.

True Meat-Heads don't really need much sun, so desperate are they to show off their muscles. Sometimes just a sunny interval when it's minus five outside is enough to have them flinging their undersized tee-shirts off and suddenly deciding to carry a refrigerator round the garden for the benefit of the chav-ette in the council house next door.    

Women.

The great thing about nice weather is that many women seem to go out forgetting to put most of their clothes on and that's great news for all the guys. Unfortunately it's not limited to the attractive ones, and the sight of acres of milk-white cellulite, muffin tops and fat guts can be quite a stomach churning affair for us blokes. Then again I don't suppose we all look like Brad Pitt. There should be some kind of police force to make these people cram it away somewhere. And just on that subject, whoever told women that black clothes make them look slimmer? Maybe against a black background where they would just be a floating head, but in real life I'm sorry but they just go from looking fat to looking fat and black coloured.    

Men.

Good weather is also excellent for all the guys to perv at all these women who have left home forgetting to get dressed. All men perv. It is a cross we have to bear. It was made easier in the 80's as mirrored sunglasses were fashionable, and these, accompanied by swivel-eyes made it possible for a bloke to walk with his head facing forward but his eyes facing in a completely different direction. A well practiced guy could achieve a full 180 degrees of good quality perv-vision while apparently walking and looking straight ahead. Without the aid of these perv-glasses you had to be more subtle and if you got caught perving you had to suddenly find a nearby street light unbelievably fascinating. Of course if you dared leave the house today in a pair of mirrored shades, people would probably die from laughing.

On the subject of pervs, when you look up at a town centre CCTV camera or one in a shopping centre, you assume that a highly paid and very responsible policeman is looking through it, looking for signs of crime.  No.  It's a perv.  A £3.00 per hour slobbering McDonald's reject with a copy of the Sport sitting next to his joystick and a licence to perv and get paid for it. Sorry ladies, but while you're getting your handbag pinched he's busy trying to zoom in on someone else's big boobies. Of course, if you have large boobies you can be assured of excellent CCTV protection wherever you go.

                                                                           Meat Heads. No pain no brain.

Hi-Fi Freaks.

What kind of knob spends £84 on a HDMI lead? I mean these people obviously do exist because the leads are on the shelf in Dixons and the staff will try to sell you one at the first opportunity. I needed one recently and I was already pissed at having to pay £19.99 for what is a piece of wire, when a spotty member of staff who looked about 11 recommended one of the 'superior' ones. The conversation didn't last long, neither did the one about the extended warranty on the item I had purchased. I used to have this same conversation about 'gold' SCART and phono leads that cost a fortune. FACT: You can get any lead on Ebay for £3 and you will not be able to see a difference in picture or sound quality compared to an £84 one. I have even challenged staff in shops to a £100 bet if they can tell me which telly has the 'superior' lead on it but unsurprisingly no-one has ever accepted the offer. The plain fact is that they know as well, and they're not prepared to put their money where their mouths are.

The fact is, there are no shortage of gullible people out there, and sadly they are nearly always men, thinking they are getting something better. The retailers have tapped into this male trait with clever packaging and liberal use of sprayed gold plugs, and now make a fortune as these dicks trundle out of the shop clutching their £50 phono, USB or SCART leads, convinced of their superiority over the cheap ones that the bloke next door has.

A few years ago I purchased a nice hifi system, and the bloke from the shop came to deliver and connect it. He had recommended some £200 speaker cables and he nearly needed a defibrillator when I produced my versions, made from 6mm cooker cable. When we fired it up however, he grudgingly had to admit that it sounded as good as the others in his shop. I explained that it is just copper for heaven's sake, (and more copper than in his cables ironically). The amplifier doesn't know it's cooker cable. Honest. He probably sells it now.

If you now imagine extending this male anal tendency to its most extreme, you will find web sites with men prepared to pay £20,000 for a turntable that needs to stand on a concrete plinth and £11,000 for a set of speaker cables - before we even start talking about the bits in-between or the bit the sound comes out of. Does it not occur to these guys that the plastic disk they are playing was stamped out in 2 seconds by a machine probably costing half that of their turntable? The male animal is a fascinating thing.

                                                                  £20,000. To play cheap plastic disks with grooves in.

                                                                 Email me if you want one.

Mr Mean with 59 BHP...

Around 1995 I was presented with my brand new 'M' reg replacement company car. It was a white 1.7D Vauxhall Cavalier Envoy. 'Envoy' sounded good on paper but it transpired that it actually meant a Cavalier base model that they had stripped of what few features it had actually had, leaving just a steering wheel and some seats. It wasn't even an 'L' as driven by most sales guys. It was about 4 trim levels below an 'L' if that is mechanically possible and still be legally classed as a vehicle. 'Envoy' means representative. This was representative of all things shit. The dashboard was awash with those little blanking plugs they put in where a switch should be in every other model. Little plugs that yell out  "If you weren't such a thick tosser you'd have a decent job and I'd be a switch for something useful or comforting".  All the other diesel models had an Isuzu turbo diesel that was a good engine but mine had a non-turbocharged clod of an diesel more suited to light horticultural work.

Anyway, its pitiful excuse for an engine produced 59 BHP. Yes, you did read it right - 59 BHP in a 4 door saloon car. We're talking rotivator power here. I looked it up in back of 'What car' and this gave a 0-60 time of 19.5 seconds which made it easily the slowest production car available - possibly of all time. Even the Model T was probably faster. Desperately I scanned the pages of figures looking for something slower but there was nothing, and all this before I filled the boot up with a load of heavy gear! By modern comparison, a pensioner's 1.0 Kia Picanto can do it in 15 seconds and that's damned slow. I couldn't believe just how slow it could be until I drove it. Unfortunately at that time I fancied myself as Mr Mean, the company car driver, cruising the outside lane at high speed in bullish fashion, making all and sundry move out of my way. How was this going to happen in a company car with a lawnmower engine? I managed to fine tune my 'A' road overtaking manoeuvres by rushing up behind cars to build up speed then darting past, missing them by a coat of paint. Unfortunately if something came the other way, I had to abandon it and drop back ready to try and build up speed again. All driving was done with the accelerator buried in the floor, I even pulled the carpet back so the pedal would travel slightly further. In fact, the portion in the middle of the pedal travel was actually of no use. The only two useful positions for this engine/foot interface device were off and fully on, the middle part being just a fleeting transitional phase from one state to the other. It could in fact have been replaced with a foot switch, making it a digital device with just positions for 'idle' and 'on'.

I would cruise the motorways of this fair land with my accelerator in the 'on' position  and my impotent diesel engine flat out at about 4500 RPM. On a good day, depending on wind direction and altitude density it would achieve a speed of 95MPH on the speedo, meaning about 86 MPH in real life. I would take on everyone. BMW's, Mercs and all manner of far superior cars moved over to let this bellend through. I was fine as long as no-one speeded up though, if anyone moved over and applied the slightest bit of throttle I was completely outclassed and had to drop back in shame. I was a bull without any horns, or balls for that matter. Luckily this didn't happen often and I inevitably managed to build up enough momentum to crawl past. Sometimes when I was already at my limit I would settle in behind a fast moving luxury car in lane 3 and just cruise absolutely flat out for miles taking the lead from the proper car in front. One day I had joined the motorway and proceeded straight to lane 3 like bellends do and tried to drop in behind a car doing what looked like a respectable speed. It was a Volvo estate car with 850 T5 on the back.

Try as I might with my foot to the floor I couldn't catch this car. This guy was actually cruising along, probably quietly listening to The Archers on radio 4, and at a speed higher than the top speed of my pitiful excuse for a car! It was so depressing. Within a few miles he was a dot in the distance without even noticing my gasket-bursting attempts to keep up with him. The Volvo T5 stuck in my mind from that day on as being a brilliant Q-car. In other words a normal, even dowdy-looking estate car with a great amount of go. I longed to have something like that as a company car but is wasn't going to happen. Years later and though I am lucky enough to own some great cars, I still had a yearning for that T5, so now I own one, although it does puzzle my wife, but then it's not top of every bloke's wish list is it?

                                                                   My utterly brilliant T5

17th April.

A crap tool always blames its workman....

Every DIY-practicing man has at some stage picked up a 'bargain' set of screwdrivers or a 1000 piece socket set for what seems like a ridiculously low price. The trouble is, you get them home and you find out why. The socket set turns out to be made from a metal so soft, it has trouble staying solid at room temperature. So you're there underneath your car, trying to undo the exhaust clamp made by Satan himself, and the hexagonal socket decides it doesn't like being that way any more and becomes circular, thus causing your hand to fly off at 400 mph into something nearby that's sharp and rusty. Your hand then becomes a mess of blood, oil and rust, a lot of naughty words are uttered and the dog gets yet another kick in the balls. Alternatively you can be there pressing hard on your Tandy screwdriver trying to undo that corroded screw on your lawnmower when the handle (which appears to have been made from a boiled sweet) shatters and the blade attempts to ram itself through your palm.

I've had screwdrivers so soft that they would probably melt during a hot summer, Who makes this shit?  Somewhere there's a factory called 'Crap Tools & Co' with the motto 'Dedicated to making shite for idiots to buy or get for Christmas for 50 years'.

Power tools are no exception. There is an obsession now with all things cordless. Yes, professional cordless drills are great and building sites are full of them, but some of the stuff you see in DIY stores is crud. Cordless circular saws that would need recharging after cutting through a match. A cordless Strimmer for heaven's sake. The weeds would probably die from laughing at you brandishing this utterly ineffectual plastic excuse for a machine with a Meccano motor and 2 'D' cells in it. "No more messy extension leads" it says on the box. Well bearing in mind that it's only suitable for a window box, you wouldn't have needed a bleedin' extension lead would you?

I'm sick of it. I bought a yard brush recently. How can you make a crap yard brush? Well B&Q have mastered it. You just get someone to make the bit where the shaft meets the head out of some plastic that would be more at home in a margarine tub or the dashboard of a Kia. I'm not a particularly big or overly strong example of a human male but I managed to snap it off while brushing some dust out of my greenhouse. I'm now left with a wooden stick that's ideal for home defence and a large hand brush. (Only useful if you've got some large hands that need brushing).

Years ago my brush would have been milled from solid oak and pig-iron, I would have purchased it from a hardware store that smelt of creosote, from a main wearing a brown coat, and apart from a 50,000 mile service it would have served me until retirement, whereupon I would have handed it down to my children. It would have been made in a proud factory in the North with chimneys and the company name spelled out in white bricks. It would have been crafted by hard working grimy men smoking Woodbines and dressed in boiler suits. Most of all it would have been fit for purpose.

My big problem with all this modern manufacture is the obsession with shaving pennies from production costs by making crap. What B&Q didn't grasp is that the 10p they saved in replacing a tiny piece of metal with plastic in my brush was false economy because firstly I would have paid the extra money, and secondly I won't be buying another.

No picture this week, got a busy day planting lots of stuff. Hopefully I won't snap my B&Q balsa-wood and tin-foil spade on a weed. 

27th March

Cooking doesn't get tougher than this...

Do you watch that Masterchef on the telly?

Thanks to Sky Plus I seem to have ended up following this strangely compelling series, which is rare for me. Basically loads of amateur cooks of varying degrees of skill enter the competition and are given various challenges in a back-street 60’s office block with a Masterchef logo nailed on it. They all have one thing in common though, they are all convinced that they are good at cooking because their families say so. It’s an X-Factor of cooking basically where some turn out to be genuine stars and some are hopelessly deluded morons who could overcook a pan of water.

The two presenters, who for some reason never address the camera, but talk sideways across your telly to someone sitting in your fireplace, consist of a chef guy with no top lip who reminds me of the Churchill dog and a baldy grocer whose job it is to copy everything the chef guy says.

A bunch of worried looking contestants are wheeled in and given about an hour to make something from a pile of ingredients. They are also quizzed about their culinary ambitions. “Hi I’m Harvey and I’m a Professor of ridiculous calculations at Oxford, but I dream of working long unsociable hours in a hot, cramped kitchen for crap money”. While the cooking efforts take place, both chef guy and baldy guy make a point of pulling disappointed and surprised faces on camera while they watch their hapless victims accidentally putting red cabbage in their Eton Mess and such like.

The worst kind of contestant is the one who thinks he or she can produce pretentious Michelin-star quality food when clearly they can't. It's down to the judges to put them in their place by telling them that their pan fried mole-spleens served with a Scottish fog garnish look beautiful but are sadly lacking in taste. Should have just done the chicken Kiev then.

The results of all these efforts are now judged and this often ends up being a piece of beef or lamb that looks like it could probably recover and walk away back to the field. Alternatively it is scallops, which seem to pop up in every episode (much to the indignation of all scallops who may be watching) and these seem to vary in quality from completely raw to the consistency of engine-mounting bushes. Chef guy usually gives his opinions first, baldy guy (who often seems to have trouble with spoon manipulation, holding it like a chimp) then says exactly the same thing when he finally removes the cutlery from his gob.

The culinary cretins who failed are then asked to pack up their expensive knife sets and leave the building in shame. They skulk off back up the grubby street to face their families and friends, and to explain why their lamb was still twitching and their mash lumpy and under-seasoned - whatever that means.

The lucky winners of that round then trot off to some posh eatery in London where the Professor of ridiculous calculations finds out just how much fun it is to work your balls off in a hot kitchen for hours with some pedantic self-important foreign bellend of a chef whinging at you. He’s thinking that perhaps sums aren’t so bad after all.

If you haven’t seen it, give it a go, it’s well worth a watch.   

21st March

A load of crap...

On my travels this week I found myself walking along one of Bolton's main streets. It always amazes me how at 11.30 in the morning on a Wednesday, a town can be full of people. Are they on holiday from work? I'm so tempted to ask some of them sometimes but luckily I have more sense and I don't want to test the A&E facilities at the local Hospital.

Anyway, as I trotted along, there on the footpath was a large green turd. Green? Actually it was almost that same dark British Racing Green that they used to paint Rover cars back when we had factories. I can only assume that this was laid by a large vegetarian dog. Anyway I swiftly dodged it, and its smaller equally green companions nearby, and carried on to the place where I was working.

Half an hour passed and I was on my way back. Of course my subconscious hazard map still had the turd location in memory, so as I approached the same spot I instinctively looked down ready for evasive action. There was the turd, but now it had a big footprint right in the middle of it, so heavy was this footprint that the two pointed ends of the previously horizontal log had risen from the pavement. The treads of the unfortunate person's shoe were so deep that a substantial portion of the green poo was missing in action.

Apart from the obvious question, which is how can anybody be that stupid, the question that concerned me most was why did I think it was highly amusing? Am I sick to be chuckling about this poor person treading in poo? There's something inherent in most men that finds all toilet related stuff a source of constant amusement. To a woman, farts are an embarrassing bodily function, but to men they are an endless source of merriment that we never seem to tire of. This inbuilt ability to find bottom-related activities and digestive problems amusing often seems to transcend all male barriers of age, race and social class. When we were kids we played with stink bombs, although these are probably banned now on health and safety grounds. There was nothing funnier than discretely treading on one in a lift or other confined space and watching the ensuing fallout. 35 years later I did a small silent fart in the supermarket queue and it was so bad there were 2 people with hankies over their faces. I nearly coughed up a kidney trying to keep a straight face as people around me gagged and choked, and my wife gave me a knowing steely stare of un-amused disgust. 

Occasionally I have to take a long distance car trip with my business partner and on some journeys I have to sit there while he does stomach-churning rotten turnip-farts all the way to Scotland. To ensure I get the full benefit he holds up the electric window switches so I can't open the window. This is a 40 year old businessman. On the last trip I got up early for breakfast (which I never normally bother with) and deliberately scoffed a full large tin of baked beans. 6 hours later and I was enjoying full air-superiority, producing an almost uninterrupted barrage of dreadful bean-farts without retaliation and holding up the window switches myself. Sweet revenge and worryingly funny.

                                                                                  How to impress a girl on the first date...

16th March

An ad in the paper today by our beloved government warns that if you have 2 glasses of wine a night you double your chance of cancer. Have they ever thought why we like a drink at night?

Thanks to them we work longer hours in our country than anyone else in Europe, to pay some of the highest taxes in Europe. We then struggle home in our heavily-taxed cars through some of the most congested roads in Europe, dodging huge pot-holes on the most under-maintained roads in Europe. Either that or we could be standing up on some of the crappiest public transport in Europe. Is it any wonder that when we eventually sit down at night to try and watch some of the stuff that SKY squeezes in between the ad-breaks that we need to drink ourselves stupid? I like a drink at night. It makes work and Gordon Brown go away for a while.

7th March

Compo culture...

"Hello, my name's Dave Cretin and I've just tripped over a paving slab because I'm a clot and now I think someone must pay"

Sadly this is the way we now think. In years gone by, if we tripped on the pavement we'd just surreptitiously look round to make sure no-one was laughing their balls off and sheepishly hobble away. Nobody thought that it could possibly be the council's fault that we couldn't look where we were going, why would they? Even if someone accidentally dropped a motorway bridge on your car and you spent months in hospital having your entire skeleton replaced, you'd still laugh it off as your own mistake. We now live in a blame culture and although not as bad as in the US where you can claim 1 million billion dollars if you so much as slip on a chicken nugget whilst in McDonalds, it's getting that way. I saw something a few nights ago where some guy's disposable shaver was broken when he took it out of the packet and he scratched his face leaving a barely visible scar. He got six grand compensation. The amazing thing was, he had an existing scar on his chin that looked like he'd fallen head-first into an industrial mincer, so you never even noticed the faint line from the shaver incident. I don't know about you, but I think I'd notice if my shaver had fallen to bits. Some fat stupid morons in the U.S. have even tried to claim from McDonald because they say they didn't know that living on the stuff would make you fat. Even given the intelligence of the average American, that's got to be pretty thick.

In the old days, if someone was daft enough to drive into the back of your car you'd swap details, get the car fixed on their insurance and that was that. Now instead people struggle out of their cars after a 3 MPH shunt rubbing their necks, with their eyes lit-up with pound signs, while they mentally book their next holiday with the ensuing compensation. They then have 12 weeks off work with a traumatised neck bone and claim 5K.  These same people moan that their car insurance costs a fortune, I wonder why that is?

The nanny state is the obvious reaction to the compensation culture. All those handy leaflets and signs advising "don't forget to breathe" and "please watch out for pointy things" and "do not eat the road surface" are in response to an ever-increasing population of stupid people doing stupid things and thinking that someone else is to blame for them being a moron. If you put up a sign saying "pointy things ahead" then you are covered legally when some moron impales his brain on one. That's why we're bombarded with safety signs everywhere we go.

The trouble is, even then you have to make allowances for people who can't read or don't speak the language, so you end up with a yellow and black pictogram with a brain impaled on a pointy thing. So now instead of a 'beware of the dog' sign on your gate, you need to erect a sign with a yellow generic canine quadruped figure munching a non-gender or race-specific black coloured human lower limb...

                                                           The photo below was taken in Oldham and it clearly explains a lot about the people there.  

                                                                      No shit......

20th Feb.

The black helicopters are watching...

"Dreams can come true" sang Gabrielle. Well last night I dreamt that a Pterodactyl was eating our lounge ceiling, so I hope not lass. Imagine filling in the form for the house insurance. While I was scanning through SKY the other night desperately looking for something to watch, I came across 'Invasion of the Daleks'. Now I know it's an old joke that all you have to do to escape a Dalek is go upstairs or up a kerb, but that was 40 years ago. We've fitted so many disabled access ramps and lifts, and widened so many doors that the Daleks could now invade quite easily. We even have the Disability Discrimination Act. I think that it's all a big conspiracy, that the Labour party is actually run by Davros (that would explain a lot) and that the DDA is in fact the Dalek Discrimination Act and is paving the way for a future (and much easier) invasion.

This may sound barmy but it's no barmier than some of the stuff people believe on the internet. Let's just pick one apart, like the fact that the U.S. blew up their own twin towers with explosives. I work in a lot of big buildings, they are run by a team of building managers and maintenance staff. You have to be security checked and have to sign out passes and security swipe cards to go anywhere. Just how do you gain access and plant tonnes of explosives? "Hello, I'm from a contractor you've never heard of, and I'm here to fit some 'special air conditioners' that you haven't ordered in all of your service risers". Let's just for a moment assume you manage to do it. How many people would you have to involve? Lots. How would you ever keep them all quiet? You wouldn't. Most conspiracy theorists don't consider this sort of irritating detail because they don't live on the same planet as normal people.

What about Roswell? Well we're expected to believe that a futuristic flying saucer navigated its way across millions of light-years of deep space to get here, then managed to crash into a small hill. Some Americans then carted off the bodies and wreckage and have used the technology for their research. Well here we are 60 years later and it hasn't helped them much has it? The pinnacle of U.S. technology is the stealth bomber. It's made out of the same shit that they make bikes out of and it's still powered by the 60 year old jet engine. So much for anti-gravity then. Apparently the most popular types of aliens are the 'Greys' from Zeta Reticuli. By some amazing co-incidence (or dreadful lack of imagination on their part) they have 2 eyes, 2 ears, a nose and a mouth, albeit in different proportions to our own. This is much like Star Trek where all aliens have different rubber heads but with the same old familiar features as our own and speak perfect English. If you're going to invent some aliens at least have a bit of imagination...

I'm sorry but there aren't any flying saucers. Crop circles, cattle mutilations and human abductions are all carried out by humans, or are inventions of the human mind. I only had to float some bin bags in the air with candles inside to get UFO reports in our paper. Don't you think it's amazing that despite half the planet now owning camera-phones that no-one has yet come up with a good picture of an alien/flying saucer/ghost/apparition? I'm still waiting.

14th Feb                                        

Two things you never hear people say:

Ooh, these supermarket pizzas are fantastic!

Have you tried that mobile broadband, it's great!

Strangers in the night...

We were awoken last night at about half past 3 by a group of pissed up lads who were meandering up the road outside our house. They'd obviously drunk their taxi money and had to walk the 3 or so miles back from the place near us where young people generally go to get 'hammered' or 'plastered' or 'shit-faced' or 'overly refreshed' or whatever the phrase is now. Being very drunk and very loud, it took them a long time to stagger and shout their way past. One decided to press our gate intercom while passing. Well that was a jolly wheeze, what an original idea. Obviously a future comedian. Not that it did anything because we, like everyone else in a 200M radius were already awake. Now I was a young Bellend once and as far as I am concerned, as long as they don't come on to our property I really don't care because they're just being young, but it did take me back to a similar incident many years ago..

I was living in a one-room grubby bed-sit in a converted house adjacent a similar road and one night 2 equally pissed up characters came past. Unfortunately they seemed to run out of forward momentum right by the property where my seedy residence was. They then proceeded to fall about on the grass verge and generally make a lot of noise for what seemed like hours. This was a night where I had to be up for work next day so I began to have what can only be described as a 'sense of humour failure'. After some time trying to sleep I finally reached for my air rifle, which was a powerful and heavily silenced hunting rifle, and loaded a 5.5mm stainless steel and nylon hunting pellet...

I'm ashamed of it now, but I picked out the noisy fat one in my cross-hairs and shot the poor bugger in the arse. He instantly jumped about 3 feet in the air and let out a scream that pierced the night air and could have ripped duvets. It had the desired effect however and, imparted with a newly-discovered sense of extreme urgency, they both suddenly regained their capability for forward travel and staggered off into the night. It didn't help me much though because far from sleeping peacefully, I lay awake thinking a Police armed response unit would be outside the window at any moment with a loud hailer telling me to throw out my weapon.

I thought nobody knew about this, but a few weeks later a lady from one of the other bed-sits remarked how they had laughed as they too had been disturbed and lying awake, heard the creak of my window, followed by a shot, a scream and another more hasty creak of my window.

To the fat boy whom I shot in the arse 25 years ago, and who probably still has the scar, I'm deeply sorry.  

Epilogue: What I didn't say is after half an hour of trying to get to sleep with the worry and guilt (and waiting for a SWAT team to arrive), I got in the car, drove down the road and found the lads still laughing and falling about in the grass a few hundred yards further down. Out of guilt I stopped and asked if they were ok or wanted a lift somewhere. They assured me that  they were fine (without any mention of some lunatic shooting one of them), so I went back to bed relieved that my air rifle or my marksmanship was not as good as I thought!

                                                               I say you chaps, I'll press this! What a jolly wheeze!

Feb 6th

Collectors...  Why?

Some genius at the computer shop fixed my other PC! Something called RAID had somehow forgotten I had any hard drives apparently. It just needed reminding again. (with £20). That's good because my new Windows 7 PC didn't like anything, my printer, my scanner, my house, my face, my software... apparently it's 64 bit and my face isn't...

I'll keep it on standby for when I can afford a new printer, scanner, house, face, software etc etc.. I never thought I'd be glad to see Vista, but here I am.

Some nights, if the telly's crap (which is often) I'll grab the wifey's Macbook thingy and type some random stuff into Google like 'DIY surgery' or 'eating pet food' or 'homemade sex toys' or any random rubbish which comes into my head to see what I get back. The results are often deeply disturbing. The other night I typed in 'toilet paper collection' and yes, some spanner out there collects toilet paper. Of course then I couldn't resist trawling the web for more of these strange collections and their owners.

Have you ever wondered what a funny bunch collectors are? Also they're almost exclusively male. A few random searches found hits on spark plugs, calculators, teddies, street lights, milk cartons, bus tickets and all manner of football shit. What is it about the male human animal that gives him the urge to be a collector?  You don't see gorillas with collections of interesting tree stumps or a rat proudly admiring his full collection of McDonalds wrappers. It's not always manly things either, If you collect live nuclear warheads or steel girders, at least it's manly, but teddies?  As a young man, if I had ever shown a desire to collect teddies, my father would have instantly enrolled me on a 5 week residential shed-building and truck repair course, followed up by bonfire-construction (level 3) and advanced manual hole excavation. When I came back I'd have been eating bowls of nails and Brillo pads for breakfast, reading 'Which Boiler Suit' magazine and drinking orange coloured tea with six sugars from a chipped enamel mug.

I think part of the collector's satisfaction is the careful cataloguing, arrangement and the sheer self-indulgence of smugly admiring his collection. In every field of collecting there must be a 'holy grail' that they all strive for, like the coin that got minted wrong and they only struck 50 of, or the toilet paper with Queen Victoria's skids on, or the limited edition 1962 milk carton where they spelt 'Milk' wrong. Some collectors are incredibly anal, I watched something the other night and a model train collector was there with a magnifying glass checking to make sure that a model loco have never been run. Why? Does it really matter? Obviously it does, and a lot.

The only things I've ever collected were penalty points on my licence and those stupid petrol station vouchers which isn't quite the same I suppose. Were you ever stupid enough to collect those? With every fill-up you got a little paper slip which you saved with the idea of exchanging them for a telly or something eventually. When you'd driven twice round the earth, worn out four company cars and amassed 6 bin-bags full of vouchers you would get the catalogue from the petrol station and find that if you did another circuit of the earth you may be able to get the nasal hair clipper. 

There was talk that Virgin Airlines saved enough over 4 years for the Tupperware set but unfortunately the scheme was shut down before they could claim it.

                                                                Shaun the cretin with his collection of milk cartons.

Jan 29th

My brain's useless...

The Bellend is back.

It's been a while. Been busy with work and then Crimbo and more work. I'm now on that Windows 7 because my PC exploded and I needed a new one fast. It seems ok but despite supposedly being compatible with everything Vista-ish it won't run Autocad because apparently now I'm 64 bit whatever that means.

I was watching a programme the other night about artificial intelligence and how we were having problems getting anywhere near the abilities of the human brain. Well I don't think brains are actually that good.

The calculator on my desk was free with something, yet it can do far more complex calculations than I could ever dream of, with 10 pence worth of Silicon inside it. My computer could probably store 1000 large books and recall any sentence in less than a second, when I can't remember what I had for lunch. A computer checking spuds on a conveyor belt will do it 24 hrs a day without moaning that it's bored or tired. In contrast a brain would take around 16 years to develop from birth to a useful capacity, and then it would want to read The Sun all day and go home and sleep for 8 hours! When you see a robot struggling to do something apparently simple like pick up a cup, remember that you took several years to learn yourself!

Yes, it is amazing how a hover fly can do all those flight calculations using nothing more that a bit of gunge the size of a full stop for a brain but it's had several million years of development. We've only been messing about with semiconductors for 50 years and we've already got FaceTube, but never mind, some useful things have come out of technology as well. It's still going to be a good many years before we see intelligent robots working for us I think .....

13th Dec

Goodbye old farty...

We had the car scrappage scheme, we now have the boiler scrappage scheme, but the real way to save the planet is an old husband scrappage scheme...

My proposal for Labour to save the planet is an 'old husband scrappage scheme'. Tests indicate that older models of husband have been found to be a threat to the planet with their liking of gas guzzling vehicles like Jags and their fondness for mid-life-crisis 'weekend' cars, bikes and classics. In addition they often develop a liking for fine food and drink, meaning tonnes of CO2 is released by supermarkets importing foreign goods like real Italian pasta instead of stuff extruded in Scunthorpe. Unfortunately the inevitable outcome of this taste for better food is a higher planet-threatening level of bum emissions. Middle-aged bum emissions have a higher methane content which is much more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas we are told. Another worrying trait after the age of 45 is a propensity to make bonfires at any opportunity and to own a petrol mower instead of the B&Q electric one that stalls if it hits a sweet wrapper. Worst of all is that the middle aged husband is much likelier to be a climate-change doubter which in itself is now unforgivable.

Government surveys show that many wives would welcome the chance to scrap their old model and receive a contribution towards a shiny new one. The newer models tend to consume less (and simpler) food, drive diesel hatchbacks, don't have a 180 MPH Yamaha R1 in the garage 'just for weekends' and don't fart as much. They have also been indoctrinated into the climate change religion since an early age, so are unlikely to be doubters. The old husband will of course be sent to the crusher, along with his vehicles, high power hi-fi system, Suffolk Punch lawn mower, Italian spaghetti and bottles of Shiraz. 

The wife would then receive a £500 credit on a dating website to be used against a younger low-emission partner. Job done.

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I think I've torn my sack...

26th Nov

These days when household gadgetry is the norm, so much of it comes with platefuls of spaghetti wiring. Even the 'cordless' digital phone comes with a big fat mains adapter that could probably start a car and about 600 miles of wobbly stiff phone and power cable that seems to have been deliberately designed to look as ugly as possible. No matter how you try to hide this stuff it always looks a mess. Not only that, but have you ever tried to install something like surround sound? The instructions will show that the speakers are best placed in the corners of your room. Ok, very nice, but just how do you get the wires there? I've seen them nailed to skirting boards and Sellotaped up the wall in other people's houses. It's like Sky Multiroom and wired broadband, the only way of getting it in neatly is to move out for 6 months and completely dismantle your house brick by brick. Someone I know has Sky all over the house and the thick black cables have been nailed to the outside of their property and run along inside the rain gutters! Interesting installation technique Mr Sky man. Of course Sky engineers aren't allowed in the most obvious place to do this, the loft, because they may hurt themselves. Unbelievable. I did 5 years as an apprentice electrician and was hardly out of a loft. Amazingly I never managed to saw my face off or set fire to my genitals in all that time. 

Some years ago my wife bought me a video projector for Christmas. We have a spare room that I wanted to use as a home cinema and games room. The trouble with projectors is that they are at the back of the room and all the gubbins like games consoles and DVD players are at the front. Try asking Currys for a 6 Metre HDMI lead, the spotty youth therein will just look at you oddly and press the secret security button to have you escorted out. Luckily being a geek, I bought the bits from a hi-fi shop and made up my own long video component leads. Luckily again, our house is a 1930's one with a void under the downstairs floors so with a bit of 'fishing' I got these and a standard composite video feed under the floor to the projector.

For years now, every time we've wanted to use a different games console or DVD I've had to scrabble behind the cupboards with my body vertically downwards  and my arse in the air trying desperately to root out the right set of wires and plug them in. I finally gave in last week and bought one of those switcher boxes that does it for you. It's great, you just press a button and it selects the thing you want. No more arse waving then. The best £14 I've ever spent. Will someone please invent wireless everything? I mean wireless everything, power included, so all you do when you get home is take your gadget out of the box and place it on the floor, and it works. You wouldn't have any sockets in your house, it would just be beamed in from somewhere. I think someone did experiment with this using microwaves but he boiled his brain. Eeee, back to the old drawing board then...

                                                       A great £14 investment that will save me ripping my sack.

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Community Speed Check Sad Busybodies...

20th Nov

As I turned a corner this week in my car I was greeted by the sight of 3 hi-vis clad people at the side of the road. Instinctively I glanced down at my speedo and to my surprise I was actually driving at the speed limit for a change. Even then I still found myself feeling guilty as I approached them which strangely I always have. Years ago I'd have been worrying about the slightly bald tyre on the back or the brake light bulb that needed changing, but I drive a new car now for heaven's sake, what is there to feel guilty about?  All apprehension soon faded however as on closer inspection the group turned out to be a PCSO (Plastic Plod) and 2 CSCSKDB (Community Speed Check Sad Kia-Driving Busybodies) wielding an ancient radar gun that the Police haven't used since I drove a TR7 sometime during the carboniferous period. Bearing in mind that this was a normal afternoon when I and most normal middle-aged people were at work, who on earth has the time to stand around at the side of the road in their brand new Millet's hi-vis jackets pretending to be police? At least the PCSO gets paid a few quid to pretend to be a Policeman, the busybodies are just doing it for ... what exactly? They're obviously so important the Police can't even be bothered to send a real Plod. 

As I rumbled past at exactly 29.99 MPH the disinterested plastic-plod half-heartedly raised his ancient radar gun so I cheekily gave a blip of my V8 which caused them all to stare at me very hard indeed. A look in my mirror showed them still staring at me when I was nearly out of sight. He was still aiming his radar gun, probably wishing it was an Uzi 9mm by this time. I'll probably now get a summons through the post for being in possession of an offensive face....

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I'll have a big mac please...

15th November

I picked up an old G3 iMac this week from Ebay, a rare 'Flower Power' one. Don't know why, but I just remember admiring one in PC World about a hundred years ago. It took some time to dismantle and clean, particularly the keyboard, as a previous owner appeared to have used it instead of a dinner plate. As I scraped out the various bits of food from its gubbins and disinfected everything, I imagined someone tucking into pie and chips on his computer keyboard. A Mac would always be my computer of choice but unfortunately being in the business that I'm in I have to use CAD and other specialist software that just isn't written for them. This means I'm forced into using Microsoft's offerings and as I'm not a patient person, this means spending a lot of money on a beefy PC to run all their crap and still have a bit of processing power and memory left over for me to type the odd letter. This little Mac that looks like a 1970's portable telly still opens Photoshop CS as fast as the quad core refrigerator-sized lump I'm on now. Why is that, Mr Microsoft? Anyway they've apparently half-conceded that Vista was crap and now we can all shell out for Windows 7 to put their work right. By the way, who on earth were those people on the telly report that were queuing outside shops for the launch of Windows 7?  I'm a committed geek, but when I see things like this it defies belief. I can't imagine even in my geekiest moment queuing outside a shop for my copy of an operating system. It's like queuing for a punch in the throat or Herpes, you just wouldn't do it. When you've then legged it home with your fresh copy of Windows 7 and installed it, what do you do? Windows doesn't actually do anything, its just a menu system, albeit a bloody hungry one. Do you just sit there getting aroused by it? In a similar vein, why do people pre-order computer games months in advance then attend midnight launches? I just wander down the day after and get one of the millions off the shelf. Yes, I play video games and that naturally enlists me into the ranks of geekdom, but these people queuing for Windows and games at midnight seem to be on a different planet. Compared to a man that queues in the rain waiting for his copy of Windows 7 I'm a mega-cool dude.  

                                              Big Mac.  Still better than my Vista-powered £1500 wardrobe.

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7th November

Dogs. What's the point?

If anyone is ever brave enough to mention genetic engineering or cloning, there is an inevitable outcry in the press citing 'Frankenstein' or 'meddling with nature'. Well we've already been doing it for years, where do you think the poodle and the sausage-dog came from? Selective breeding is of course genetic engineering but nobody ever mentions it. I've never watched one of Dave Attenborough's epics and seen a pack of wild sausage-dogs working together to hunt down a bison, although it would no-doubt be entertaining and would result in lots of pizza-shaped dogs and that can't be a bad result. Just on that subject, I don't know about you but I don't enjoy watching animals tear each other to bits on these programmes. If it was me shooting the documentary and it got to that point where "the weaker baby antelope starts to fall behind the herd, and the lion sees its chance" I would shoot the lion through the brain, get it on a spit over a campfire and show it who really is at the top of the food chain on this planet. As an alligator closed in on some desperately swimming cute and furry animal, I'd be there at the controls of a hydraulic dredger to squash its head flat, saying "call that a bite?, this is a bite Mr Snappy". As a pack of hyenas closed in on injured baby goat I'd strafe them all with a vehicle-mounted chain-gun and take the goat to the vets. As the snake slid silently towards the nest of baby mice, a spade would come somewhat unnaturally into shot and chop its head off. My version of nature programmes would be so much more balanced and satisfying for the public. Somehow I don't think they'll be ringing me though.

Anyway, back to dogs. Dogs are pointless, noisy, smelly, baby-eating wild animals and should all be shot. They don't serve any purpose and don't lay very nice eggs. From the smallest handbag sized micro-mutt to those things that look like a bloke in a furry suit, they all need introducing to the 'pan shovel on the cranium' treatment. "Come off the fence" I hear you cry. The only point in having a dog as I see it is for something to boot across the hall when you've had a bad day at work. For people like me, who don't want the smell, noise or dog hairs they could make a nice imitation one with plenty of weight in it and a big arse and maybe testicles too. They could have one of those gadgets inside to make it yelp as well, and it should also have a G sensor in there so the heftier the punt the louder the yelp. After a hard day you could open the front door and boot it all the way up the stairs. Incredibly satisfying. I need to go on 'Dragon's Den' with that one.

The most noticeable thing about dogs is how their owners develop immunity to their charms. Little Spot can be barking for 16 hours non-stop and its owner miraculously doesn't even notice. Being a normal (not dog owning) person it would seem perfectly reasonable to me to whack it on the head with something satisfyingly solid, but for some reason dog-owners are completely deaf to their own mutts. Regarding the smell, I've been to perfectly normal nice houses where you wince at the smell just coming through the letter-box, and somehow the owners can't smell it. Why is that, and why do dog lovers all assume that everyone else is a dog lover and just stand there while this hairy stinky wild animal slobbers over your hand or frots your leg?

Some common dog types:

The native town dingo.

Found in most run-down British towns, usually a gingery colour with a curly tail. Knows how to use pedestrian crossings, eats fag ends and other dog's poo. Can be seen trotting purposefully from place to place like it knows exactly where it's going. Lays turds of porridge consistency at frequent intervals and often strategically placed in those bits of grass between the curb and footpath, so if you're visiting the less salubrious end of town you have to spend ten minutes with a twig trying to get the former contents of its bowels out of your shoe treads while trying to keep your own stomach contents in.

The ball-sniffing dog.

This is the bane of tradesmen everywhere, and Labradors seem to be the worst offenders. They always have heads at human male testicle-height and they use this genetic advantage to sniff your crotch instantly upon meeting you. However hygienic you are, even if you have just scrubbed your frank & beans with Mr Muscle Drain Cleaner until you could see your face in them, they will still sniff away. They always do this in front of their owner, and particularly if this is a woman it can be embarrassing and make you feel uncomfortable and somehow unclean. It is always going to be difficult to explain to a woman that you have just met, that your balls are in fact spotless, so you just end up living with it. Again, the owners will shamelessly sit there without intervention as Fido tries to bury his head in your trousers, while you try desperately to 'pat' him away. Of course, as soon as the owner is out of sight you can exact revenge with a carefully deployed rolled-up copy of The Sun.

The noisy aggressive middle-sized dog.

These are generally barky but skinny types who like to chase visitors like postmen, however their bravery is fairly short-lived if you turn round and chase them. I was once delivering leaflets for my (then) employer and I was accosted by a dog owner for worrying his dog! This black wiry mutt chased me down his drive so I chased it back up his drive and tried to kick it in the spuds, which in itself is quite a demanding piece of limb co-ordination while running. He saw me and I got a telling off, but in keeping with dog-owner philosophy he didn't notice when the dog was chasing me the other way. These dogs really are all bark and no bite and are happy to be brave when you're walking away. Chasing dogs is something nobody ever considers, like taking on a motor cyclist in your car. Both can give surprising results if you are prepared to turn convention around and think like a Bellend.

The baby-eating dog.

Usually owned by a Grunt (see 12th Sept). These dogs you shouldn't attempt to chase because they don't run away. They are designed for killing and would be a handful for even an adult man, although I'm confident that with my claw-hammer or garden fork I'd sort one out. They are generally more intelligent than their Grunt owners and are called names like Tyson or Killer. It is unusual to find one called Spot. What normally happens is the Grunt spends years whacking Tyson on the head regularly with an iron bar to make it more aggressive and then one day it eats one of his kid's faces, to the total astonishment of the whole Grunt family who say what a good dog it always was. Baby-eating dogs are available in various sizes and have capacities of 1-5 babies a day depending on age.

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Old bastard...

1st November

Just going back to subject of the years apparently flying by, I wonder whether this perceived acceleration of time will get even worse as I get towards 50 or 60? As a child I remember the years being great protracted things, summer went on for ages which was great, and winter too. Perhaps time is actually speeding up. We'd never know if it was because all the clocks would speed up too so they'd all still be correct. Perhaps this is why our local council now leave the Christmas lights out all year round and just plug them in every year. They are probably thinking that it isn't worth putting them away because they'll be coming out again in what seems like a few weeks.  There are quite a few houses in our area that seem to adopt the same ideas, with a dusty chain of bargain crappy lights still adorning their brown-netted window, or some of those tacky icicle lights still dangling from their guttering.

This shortening of apparent time must be great for those people who put a million-million Christmas lights on their houses. This is often under the guise of 'charity' or 'it's for the kids' but behind the facade there's always a hardened geek who can't wait to get out his light-up screwdriver, strips of B&Q economy 5 Amp connector block and staple gun. It must be a personal trauma when they have to take them all down, and probably a relief for the kids who are no-doubt getting stick about it from their mates. How embarrassing to be a teenager and having to admit to people that it's your house looking like Blackpool's 'Golden' mile on a bad day. I had enough of that when I was young, our semi had a wood-effect steel garage door and shutters on the windows among other things. It always featured in treasure hunts, where an endless stream of bemused motorists would stop and stare at it whilst holding a piece of paper. I can't imagine what the clues must have been!

I have to admit it's a sad time taking down the lights myself, but only because it usually signals 'back to work time'. I enjoy Crimbo but I think it's mainly for the break now.

My mate who hates Christmas (and proves it by spending almost every one in a different country), plays the irony card. He erects a large inflatable, illuminated Santa complete with sleigh outside his house whether he's in the country or not. This regularly inflates itself for the benefit of passers-by and, whilst short of being Santa flicking the V-sign or committing a sex act with Rudolph, it sums up his thoughts on the whole festive season nicely. I'm not sure if B&Q actually have a Christmas irony decorations section.    

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Year 2000 compliant...

30th October

Don't the years fly by fast when you're getting old? It doesn't seem a minute since Bonfire Night 08, or frighteningly the 2000 millennium. Do you remember all that tripe about the millennium bug? All over the world people were fretting that everything from their doorbell to City Bank's mainframe would suddenly die at midnight. People spent thousands on firms checking 'year 2000 compliance' and other people made a fortune actually doing it. I actually saw 'year 2000 compliance' stickers on battery chargers for heavens sake. All over the world engineers were being paid astronomical sums to sit by computer systems on New Year's Eve. I know because one of my mates was in America nursing a mainframe on quadruple plus time. We as a Company were pestered by customers wanting to know if their alarm systems or CCTV would die on the stroke of midnight. I just told them not to worry because I actually thought it was a load of utter, utter bollocks from start to finish. Customers asked us what our callout rate would be for New Year's Eve because other firms doing lifts and stuff were charging £1000 a second for engineers that night. I told them that the callout rate was the same as always because nothing was going to happen.

My thoughts were thus: Writing software is done by clever people. Did they really think that someone would be stupid enough to write software that couldn't deal with 00 as a date? I could have made a lot of money out of the Millennium Bug but chose to be honest and rational. I could have gone around putting 'compliant' stickers on boxes with just a transformer inside but chose not to. Of course nobody appreciated our honesty, so we should have just ripped them off like everyone else and bought me a Porsche!

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17th October

Holidaying in the USA...

Ahh, just back from a holiday in the USA. Very relaxing except the flight home. 8 Hours surrounded by screaming babies who took it in turns to bawl their heads off for the entire flight. I contemplated how many I could stab to death with my plastic knife and fork before I would be overcome by the crew, but one look at their faces and those of fellow passengers and I felt sure they would probably join in and help. Luckily my Bose noise-cancelling headphones cut most of it out and spared my appearance on the front page of next day's papers as a baby killer. Of all the gadgets that I own, these have to rate as one of the best purchases ever. One thing to remember though is that the peaceful world within them can sometimes catch you out. Once, on a plane I let out what I thought was a quiet fart while in the tranquil world of headphone land, one that would obviously be drowned out by jet noise. However when several people turned to look at me I realised that I must have broken wind thunderously and not heard it through my headphones. When the inevitable smell of decomposing pancakes followed, everyone knew the perpetrator. Needless to say, red faced, I held the rest in until we reached the sheep-pens at the arrivals lounge by which time my entire digestive system was distended. I then unloaded some quiet ones of truly record-breaking duration to the discomfort of my queuing fellow passengers and the relief of my inflated gizzards.

If you haven't been to America before, here is a bit of info..

Driving.

The Americans drive on the wrong side of the road, and often in big stupid vehicles. If you're worried about driving in the USA, have no fear because however bad at driving you are, however unskilled or inept, you will still be better than the best American driver. To fit in better you may want to practice not using your indicators, changing speed/lane constantly for no apparent reason and eating/phoning/texting/reading while weaving from lane to lane. When traffic lights change from red to green it is customary in the USA to sit there for at least 5 seconds while your lame brain thinks about moving your foot from one pedal to the other. Never reverse into a parking space as you will instantly be recognised as a tourist - Americans can't do this. Choose your rental vehicle carefully, I recommend something unnecessarily big and stupid. My personal favourite is the Hummer H2, this being larger and more stupid than most of the natives can afford. This combined with some particularly stupid Wal-Mart sunglasses will give you a suitable road presence. It also has the advantage that it can burn a gallon of fuel just reversing out of a parking space. With a bit of practice you'll soon be weaving between lanes, changing speed constantly and driving like a native tosser. 

                                                          Eat shit Toyota Prius owner!

Eating Out.

On your first day you will probably go for breakfast and order a Grand-Slam Flim-Flam Flip-Flop Moons Over My Hammy with a side of fried lard. You will then realise why everyone in America is fat. This is because they can actually eat all this, while you will leave more than you actually eat and then sit there with that 'eyes bigger than your belly' look of shame on your face, or get it boxed up for 'later'. (This means putting it in the bin at home so you can watch some Raccoon trotting past your house that evening chewing on one of the pancakes that beat you).

The trick is to read the menu carefully, what looks like a fairly normal breakfast in the photo often comes with a cubic metre of pancakes, toast or 56LB of grated fried spuds you weren't expecting. Even seasoned tourists can be caught out like this. Ordering something you can actually finish is a skill that is acquired with time and can cause all kinds of problems with staff. Asking for a 'plain' Omelette is almost impossible as it causes some kind of software lock-up in their brains and they can often enter an endless looping subroutine where you're saying "plain" and they are saying "cheese?". The only way to break out of this loop I'm afraid is to give in and order the cheese one.

Eating out in the evenings has similar pitfalls. Never order a starter because someone suddenly appears before it arrives with a bowl of salad bigger than an upturned lampshade or an irresistible dip of some kind accompanied by what appears to be a whole warm loaf of bread. If you are a normal person it's quite possible to fill yourself up before the main or even the starter has arrived so beware.

The general rule is that if you don't weigh more than a family car you won't finish all the courses, so just don't order it in the first place. You could always try the American way of evening dining which is to shamelessly order more than you can eat, leave most of it and have it all put in boxes, then order a dessert. One phrase you'll never hear is "No thanks I'm full". 

Theme Parks.

All parks come with a liberal helping of what Americans do best - Cheese. Here in the UK we have quite a low cheese tolerance threshold and it doesn't take a lot to get our cheese-o-meters into high figures. The killer whale show at Sea World is a notable example. My cheese-o-meter needle was at full scale deflection when they did the rousing music and the film about the boy who dreamed of being a whale trainer. EPCOT is another one with its cornball Test Track ride that loonies queued for hours to ride, and tributes to various other counties. The UK part consisted of a pub and a half timbered house with Greensleeves playing in it and some Manchester United shirts. Spain was just a kiosk. I wanted to ask where the Middle East was but I got a Paddington Bear Hard Stare from my wife..

TV

American TV is great. The adverts can take a bit of getting used to, sometimes it's possible to zap your way through 70 odd channels and see adverts on every one. There are whole programmes devoted to Americans doing dumb things. One can only conclude that this is because there is no shortage of dumb Americans. I thought that I may begin to see some repeats while I was there but no, new dumb Americans continued to fill my screen every day as if someone was filming them somewhere in real time. There are also whole programmes devoted to police chasing endless numbers of young black men for miles in cars with no tyres on. All good fun and more entertaining than our endless looping conveyor belt of SKY repeats, showing old bollocks that was old bollocks even when it was made.

In conclusion, America is a great place to holiday and I'm sure to live in, providing you're not poor. We've been going for years now because there's no place quite like it. If you haven't been I would recommend you give it a go. You will weigh more when you return.

                                                                  Big stupid truck and British Bellend.

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12th September

British Grunts...

I had the misfortune to spend a day working in Blackpool yesterday. I always remember it as a dump, but it seems to have gone downhill from there, just sad little shops with peeling paint, selling crap and endless chip shops full of slack-jawed tattooed Grunts. Driving through the town it was evident from the hotels that some people were actually on holiday there, a fact which defies belief. One place had tables outside where one can relax and watch the bins being emptied, and there sat the most gormless looking couple I had ever seen, complete with a fag each. Of course they could both have been Particle Physicists, and it's just me making unfair generalisations. This set me thinking about the one thing that we still do manufacture in this country - the Standard British Grunt. We have been making these for some years now in a variety sizes and in both sexes.

Here are some of the options available when 'speccing' your shiny new British Grunt...

Fuel

Most Grunts are powered primarily by McDonalds, however you can power your Grunt on almost anything providing it has a high enough fat content. Greggs, Burger King and Ted's Fish 'N' Chip Emporium are all suitable. Stay clear of salads as this may impair your Grunt's performance and even cause internal damage. Grunts need regular additives to their main fuel in the form of Alcohol and Nicotine to ensure trouble-free long-term unemployment.

Trim Specification

The standard Grunt comes in a variety of colours, and you can individualise yours with a wide range of add-ons. Most popular being chunky jewellery, various stupid haircuts, tattoos, ear rings, 'sportswear' and baseball caps. The combinations are endless. With careful choice of these you can design a Grunt that looks a completely useless gormless twat and be the envy of other Grunt owners everywhere. We do supply a design service if you are having difficulty customising your Grunt.

Body options

Most of our Grunts are supplied as wide-body models for storage of large quantities of fuel. This makes long distance trips possible, to betting shops and benefit offices and also enables the Grunt to push a shopping trolley of fags and beer all the way from Netto to its council flat. Lightweight body options are available should you require your Grunt to be frequently pursued across fields by members of the Her Majesty's Traffic Police.

Processing power

Various processors are available for operating your Grunt's higher functions. From the standard Amoeba model up to full Moron status. The top level Moron unit has a full 200 neurons and can match a Cockroach in raw data processing. Our processors have good pattern recognition functions ensuring your Grunt can spot useful logos like McDonalds, Benson and Hedges and Stella, allowing it to easily locate fuel sources and also to recognise its Citroen Saxo among other Grunt's similar vehicles. Strong reproductive instincts are written into your Grunt's subroutines, ensuring that it will always have a council house and state benefits for the purchase of its fuel and flat-screen televisions, however limits on ROM mean that your Grunt will not actively seek a job. In the highly unlikely event that your Grunt gets a job, it must be immediately returned to the factory for re-formatting.

Notes

If you are using the Amoeba level processor we recommend that this is co-ordinated with tattoos spelling out names of close family members to keep your Grunt reminded of its identity.

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10th September. Mum's birthday.

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Enviro-bollocks...

5th September

20 Years ago, if someone had told me you could be arrested for selling light bulbs, I would have thought that they had escaped from the local home for the terminally bewildered. Here we are though. What a load of utter utter bollocks. It really does make you wonder what kind of world we live in. It should be up to the individual whether they prefer low energy lamps or tungsten, not some meddling bunch of EU beaurocrats. 

Are low energy light bulbs going to save the world? No. Lighting forms a tiny part of your household consumption. It's everything else like central heating, washers, tumble driers, air con, water heating etc that actually uses the bulk of the energy, whether it be gas or electrically powered. When they invent a compact flourescent central heating boiler then it'll be time to take notice. Somehow I don't think that's going to happen any time soon.

I wouldn't mind if the alternative technology was any good, but all they've done is taken low pressure Mercury vapour lamps (flourescent tubes) that have been about for 80 years and tied them in a knot. They flicker, they don't give the same amount of light, they take ages to warm up and they're full of Mercury, one of the most poisonous elements known to man. Very environmental. I put an 11 Watt CPL in my downstairs bog. You go in, switch the light on, wee all over the place because it's so dark, then switch it off before it's warmed up. It's now got a 60 watt lamp in. So what if my 60 watt lamp gives off 20 watts as heat? That saves on my central heating bill!

What about the miles of empty roads and car-parks lit up like daylight all night? What about the supermarkets full of open-fronted fridges? What about the thousands of heaters installed by pubs to keep the smokers warm outside? (Even I don't try and heat outside!).

All this claptrap about saving the planet annoys me. We're not trying to save the planet, we're trying to save ourselves. The planet doesn't care, it's been both hot and cold before and it'll still be here when we've long gone. If you see somewhere like a quarry that's been dug up and generally molested by man, given a few years it returns to nature and it looks beautiful again. This is exactly what will happen to our planet when we've killed ourselves off, and it'll be well rid of us.

Get real. In a million years, all traces of humans will have disappeared anyway, and in the time scale of the universe all our evolution and history will have come and gone in a microsecond. I'm sorry Star Trek fans, but there won't be any warp drive or populating other planets. It isn't possible, and if it was we couldn't afford to build any of the gear to do it as we'd be too busy trying to feed ourselves. All we're doing is delaying the inevitable, so we may as well enjoy it while we can. Buy a big car and a house well above sea level.

I'm not a good environmentalist. I drive a petrol V8. I refuse to rattle about in some agricultural diesel wankobox Euro-hatch like thousands of others who've just thrown in the towel and been taxed into the floor. We floodlight our gardens with big 250 watt sodium lamps. We have a tumble drier instead of a washing line and we fly overseas for our holidays. Our home carbon footprint is bigger than some small countries. I even - dare I say it, go out for a drive just for pleasure sometimes. Watch out though, the Enviro-Police already have you under scrutiny. This legislation isn't going to stop at your light-bulbs, next will come restrictions on manufacture of certain cars and then restrictions on air travel. In a few years time when the Enviro-Police roll up in their electric car and knock down my door on a raid, they will have to prise my 100 Watt pearl B.C. bulb from my cold dead hand...

                                                             Why should I care?

Aug 29th

Road Tossers...

What do these signs mean? Lane closed? Lanes merge?  No. These signs mean 'Sit patiently in your car watching one Tosser after another push in and then try to restrain yourself from dragging them out of their vehicles and rearranging their faces with your wheel-brace'. Admittedly the Highways Agency doesn't print the full version as it would take up too much room, but this is the real meaning.

Imagine you're in a DIY store like B&Q, and in the usual queue. You're stood there clutching your piece of pre-rotted timber and wondering why they have 150 tills and only one in use - manned by a spotty disinterested youth or someone that looks like your Gran's Gran.

What if you just ran down the side of the queue and elbowed your way in at the front? You know what would happen. Depending on the area in which the store resides, you'd be lucky to come out unharmed. It's most likely that you would emerge on a stretcher, bound for a lengthy surgical procedure to remove a chrome bath waste outlet flange from your rectal passage.

My point here is why do people feel so insulated and safe in their cars that they do this on the road? As soon as they're in their little tin boxes they're superhuman and free from harm. I'm as bad as anyone, I'll happily flick the finger at other drivers with no knowledge of who they are, they could be psychopaths, killers, drug barons or gangsters and you'd never know until they tracked you down and slit your throat in bed one night. (These sort of people always like the last laugh). Obviously I've been lucky so far and must have only flicked the finger at accountants and  sales managers of flower-pot manufacturers.

Why do the road designers build these bottlenecks? Do they get some sadistic pleasure out of creating them? I've seen lots of these lane-crunching setups that don't appear to have any function except to create queues and generally make people want to stab each other to death. The trouble is, as long as there are easy-going people out there, someone will always let them in at the front. There's only one solution to this. Even more cameras. We already have CCTV cameras, bus lane cameras, traffic monitoring cameras, number plate reading cameras, average speed cameras and Gatso cameras. What we need is ' Tosser Detection Cameras' to get pictures of the offending Tosser. We can get our Labour  government to introduce a new law (they're good at that) to cover the offence of being a Tosser on a public highway. The penalty should be a month picking up litter left by other inconsiderate Tossers, or better still, death.

Wifey...

Aug 22nd

My wife has a hair-dryer that appears to have a Rolls-Royce Turbofan engine in it. She's usually up before me and within a few minutes she cranks up this thing which emits a sound not unlike a jet engine at takeoff thrust. I mean, you can see the curtains being sucked towards the intake from the other side of the room. Meanwhile I'm trying to get a few minutes extra sleep (in 110 Db of noise and with my hair all pointing towards the hair dryer) while holding on to the duvet in case it gets sucked in and causes a catastrophic failure of her first stage compressor fan. This would inevitably cause a breach of the engine housing and we'd be picking fan blades out of the walls and our faces for days. I don't need an alarm clock because anyone who doesn't get out of bed with that racket going on is dead. I'm sure hair dryers weren't always that loud. I can imagine ladies walking along the display of hair dryers in the shop and the different models being rated in pounds of takeoff thrust and noise output. Can't someone design a husband friendly one that just purrs gently, allowing us a few more minutes precious beauty sleep?

                                                                My wife's hairdryer.

World's lowest spec company car..

Aug 16th

An interesting week at work with a lot of long hours. As usual, we end up doing the really crap jobs that we wouldn't ask our employees to do, like getting up at 6, driving 3 and a half hours to London, working until 1.30 a.m. the next day, in hotel bed by 2.30, up at 6.15, drive a further three hours back to Stoke then do another 5 hour job, then finally back home. You couldn't ask your staff to do this because they'd probably sue you. We used one of the works Peugeot's to do the trip and I very quickly noticed that I'd forgotten what it's like to drive a normal car with normal performance. After about 8 years of owning various performance cars you forget what this is like. If you want to change lanes on the motorway when it's busy, you can't just go from 60 mph to 80 in a few seconds and dive into a gap in lane three, you have to send a post card to the Diesel engine so it can build up speed. Changing gear is a futile gesture that has no noticeable effect on speed and just serves to change the engine note from an agricultural clatter to a slightly higher pitched agricultural clatter.

I suffered ten years of these sort of cars where I used to work. The worst of the lot was a Cavalier Envoy 1.7D. This had to be the slowest production car ever made. A check in a car magazine gave it 60 BHP and a 0-60 time of 19 seconds.  This engine would have been more at home in a rotivator. The accelerator was digital, it only had 2 useful positions, 'OFF' when stopped at traffic lights etc and 'ON' (to the floor) at all other times. I even pulled the carpet from under the pedal for that extra couple of MPH, I was that sad. I would get in at night from a long drive on the motorway and my foot would ache from holding the pedal on the floor as hard as I could for hour after hour. One day I got in a bit of a grudge match with a woman in a Rover Metro Kensington 1.1 on the M62. I was desperately trying to get past her in lane 3 with my digital accelerator buried in the floor, and she just accelerated away leaving me for dead. I had just been burnt off in my new company car by a woman in a Metro. This was a turning point for me. I knew then that I needed a better job. I still feel shame every time I see a metallic green Metro Kensington which thankfully isn't too often these days. That particular one will have been made into soup tins long ago. The Cavalier that I put 120,000 miles on, is probably in car heaven too.

Summer in Nelson Lancashire around 1994 and my 60 BHP Cavalier. There was no room to park outside our own house because the couple next door who lived on benefits had three vehicles. They also had two houses our size knocked into one. You couldn't help thinking that there was something a bit unfair about that as you drove off to work...

WTF is my PC Doing?

Aug 8th

Passed Navigation and Meteorology this week, that's 2 more out of the way. Booked the course for my radio licence now as well. My aim is to get all of the exams out of the way in the next few weeks and just leave the flying for when the weather gets better, assuming it ever does. I fear that this crap we're having will just blend into winter now though - another 8 months of rain and cold. You know, we used to own half the world here in England, so my question has always been, why didn't we move? We could have moved the whole nation somewhere sunny and left the British Isles as a place to keep sheep, or a prison island to send convicts or people like Geri Haliwell. A few years of this weather and the crim's would be reformed characters.

A question that often arises as I sit at my PC is WTF is it doing? I'm sitting there typing a letter or quotation and it's rattling away with the hard drive light on almost continuously on some mega-mission from God that I have no knowledge of. I'm just typing a few lines of text that could have been done under DOS on an Amstrad 1640 with a processor from a toaster and 640K of RAM. So what is it doing? It has a quad core, 4 Gig of RAM and a graphics card that could have produced Jurassic Park 1 in real-time and it's rattling away like a 286 trying to run Doom.

Perhaps someone could design a PC with 2 towers, one to run all the Microsoft crap and the other to do the stuff you actually want to do. You could store the Microsoft one in the loft somewhere where it could chug away with Vista, loading 20 different languages in case you might start speaking Swedish overnight and rattling away for hours doing all those mega-missions that only Microsoft know about. That would be networked to your PC, which being free of all that crap, would start up in less than 15 minutes and leave you free to do your own stuff without finding that 88% of the machine's resources were devoted to Vista. What is Vista? It's just a menu for picking your programs for heaven's sake! Why does it need all those resources? Just sitting there with none of my programs running, my PC is using 38% or its RAM. That's a Gig and a half before I press a key! Unbelievable. The trouble with PC programmers is that they're lazy. Because they know there's so much RAM and hard drive space to rob from you, they don't make any attempt to write compact code. I remember reading 2 game boxes in a store, one for PC and the same game for the old PS1. The PC minimum spec was 64M of RAM while the Playstation 1 was running it in 2M! A perfect example. Because they had to make it run in 2M, they did.

My wife has a laptop with Vista. You switch it on, you go on holiday and by the time you get back it's ready to use. Admittedly it's still rattling away with its hard drive light on working out the meaning of life, but you can just about use it yourself. As you type a letter, it struggles to keep the cursor up with your typing. You go to shut it down and it can't even switch off without rattling away for 2 minutes! It's a good spec machine but it's choked and strangled by Vista. I've borrowed it a couple of times and switched it off in disgust before I propel it through the window. Microsoft are so involved with firewalls, viruses, phishing filters, checking and double checking everything and loading stuff they think you may use, that they have forgotten the user. I've solved this problem however, I bought her a Mac. This starts in seconds, switches off in less than a second and has an operating system that seems to actually put the user first. So it can be done. I used Mac's for years but unfortunately my job involves lots of industry software only written for PC so reluctantly I'm a Vista slave these days too. I don't know how many features of Vista you use, I use very few so why can't you buy Vista with all the crap stripped out?  It could be called Less-ta   or Vista Noshite.

Dear Microsoft,

I don't need 20 languages, or support for disabled users, or free games, or game enhancing software, or protection from accidentally deleting files, or preloading programs, or support for game controllers, or a 'roll back' feature, or Windows Anytime, Windows Cardspace, Windows Sidebar, Windows Slideshow, Parental Controls, Power options, SCSI support, Speech Recognition, Text to Speech, People Near Me or any of the other undoubtedly excellent programs. Vista is written to make it easy for anyone to use, unfortunately this includes clots. I am not a clot. Will you or someone else write me an operating system that will give me my PC back?

                                             DOS never did this. Can I have my PC back please Microsoft?

Flying again...

Aug 1st.

Passed Avaition Law this week, so I can now tell people useless facts like whether your airliner's engine oil is liable for duty should you land in a different country. All really useful stuff for a student VFR Helicopter pilot (insert irony here). I laughed at one of the headlines this week that said 'organic veg is no better for you'. Did anyone ever think it was? Every week I see barmy people filling their supermarket trolleys with overpriced 'organic' stuff in the mistaken belief that it is somehow better because it has been grown with poo on it instead of chemicals. There's never been any shortage of gullible people easily separated from their  money and I have to applaud the growers for their ingenuity. Given the choice, I'd rather eat something with chemicals on it than poo any day. The veg from my garden are great and tastier that any stuff from the supermarket, but because I fertilise them with some stuff out of a box and occasionally spray the bugs they're not 'organic'. What I really need to do is poo on them regularly and stand guard 24hrs a day picking the bugs off with my fingers if I want 'organic' stuff. I don't think I'll be doing that any time soon.  

                                          My non-organic, poo-free, unhealthy, dangerous veg

Greece...

July 23rd

Just arrived back from a week in Greece in a friend's villa. You may think that the inevitable trip on PovoJet that this entails would make for some good queuing but amazingly everything went fine. On arrival at check-in we usually just look for the longest queue, you know, the one that's filled all the sheep-pens up and now spirals around the terminal several times and ends somewhere in the car park. Amazingly we just walked up to the check-in. Security was a breeze, the aircraft were on time and it all went well. The seats were the usual size where your knees touch the one in front and you have to eat your lunch off the man in front's head. All the seats with extra leg room were fully booked some time back in 1998 by the same type of people that queue outside supermarkets waiting for them to open, and empty all the petrol pumps if the Daily Star mentions the words 'oil refinery'. The people behind us were so fat that every time one got up to go to the toilet I thought they were going to snap our seats off trying to counterbalance their stomachs, one minute I'd be watching the movie, the next staring at the roof as this Hippopotamus of a man wrenched my seat almost horizontal trying to get up. I could imagine the pilot having to trim the aircraft as this great fat pile of offal lumbered towards the forward toilet. Amazingly I managed to sleep on the way out despite being rammed in this small space. This is always risky when you're old as you could end up having to be cut out of the plane on arrival, complete with the seat, with your body still horribly contorted in your sleeping position and needing a week long session of spinal traction, or the use of one of those hydraulic things they pull cars back straight with. As it was, I escaped with only the minor problem that my head looked towards the left for two days. It meant sitting sideways to drive the hire car and a few people in bars thought I was staring at them but otherwise it was ok.

Hire cars in Greece are interesting. While in the USA you hire a 6 wheel drive armoured assault vehicle or 8 litre (180bhp) generic Yankobarge, in Greece you hire the lowliest, crappiest, apology for a car you can get your miserly hands on. A box with four seats and air conditioning. The air conditioning is essential. Some days when we got in, it was so hot, I couldn't understand why the dashboard wasn't actually on fire. I always thought that I would rather hire a pair of roller skates than a Hyundai Getz but this little car did the job, sometimes in first gear on the steep bits, but still much better than walking. It's odd, the speed limit is say, 50 KPH, you're doing 80 KPH to try and go with the flow but the Greeks want to try to achieve 400 KPH. Everywhere. All you can do is try and keep out of their way as they pass your gutless Hyundai in their superior Fiats and Rover 200's. I don't like holding anybody up because I don't like being held up myself, so all I could do was try to stay out of the way while lots of people called Stavros tried to achieve the Greek land speed record in their Fiat Puntos.

Anyway I passed the time reading such bricks as 'Aviation Law' 'Meteorology' and 'Air Navigation' so I can hopefully pass my pilot's written exams again. I passed these particular ones about 4 years ago but they ran out and I have to take them again. I read for 6 days, 8-9 hours a day. I wouldn't recommend them, the story was crap, there weren't any laughs at all and the endings were pretty predictable.

I found this between the sun loungers one morning. It's a Praying Mantis, one of the insect world's most voracious predators. The bigger ones catch mice and birds. As he was cute I nicknamed him 'Sticky' because he's like a Stick Insect on steroids.

July 11th

Red Cabbage cures decapitation...

It was nice of Google to celebrate Nikola Tesla's Birthday on their banner this week. Quite poignant that it was displayed round the world, as this was the man who was trying to engineer a world power and information system a hundred years ago...

"As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place"

Nikola Tesla 1908

I Went out flying circuits on my own in preparation for a solo navigation exercise. Haven't flown solo for 4 months so it's always a bit daunting when you pull on the lever for your first take-off. It's a good moment when you realise you've done it without crashing and dying. There was a brisk crosswind on the airfield and that always makes the hover-taxi more challenging as the tail always tries to rotate downwind, but I took it slow and it went fine. I've always enjoyed the flying but dreaded the solo part, not in case I die but worse still, what if I bend the aircraft?  As I obviously can't spend the rest of my life with a co-pilot sitting next to me I had to come to terms with flying on my own confidently. I think I'm sorted now and I'm ready to fly a navigation next week - weather permitting. 

On the subject of dying, do you ever get fed up of those endless newspaper headlines "TOMATOES CURE CANCER" and "SALAD CREAM CURES AIDS" etc? Hardly a day goes by without some article from some researcher (who funds them?) telling you that something has miracle properties. Does anyone really care? Assuming anyone does, how on earth would you keep up with it all? You'd have to check the newspaper that day to see whether it's ok to be fat or thin, whether a glass of red wine is actually good for you this week or will kill you instantly and whether your morning coffee is going to stop you getting Alzheimer's that day or burst your heart. I once knew a guy who smoked and when I asked him about giving up he said "It's ok I only smoke the ones that say they harm your baby on the packet". Good point. The plain facts are if you don't smoke, keep your weight down and exercise regularly you should live to a ripe old age. If you get something nasty it's just hard luck and not because you didn't spend every day eating platefuls of Broccoli. We do know for certain however that smoking tampons can cause hearing loss and consumption of Miracle Grow can cure decapitation. I think the most ridiculous one this week was the front page headline "NEW PILL CAN EXTEND LIFE BY 20 YEARS". When you actually read it, they had found a chemical that extended a lab mouse's life a little. However it also wipes out its immune system, so outside a lab it would croak pretty quick. Even its inventor said don't expect any miracle human equivalent. Never let the facts get in the way of a good headline eh? Scientists must get really fed up of this, one day they manage to do an experiment duplicating some incredibly tiny particle and this gets translated by the News of The World into "STAR TREK TRANSPORTERS A REALITY".

While I'm here I want to say something about Jacko's kids. Apparently there are rumours that they are not his. WTF??? Yes I know he's white, but his DNA is that of a black man with the usual features that come with that. How can anyone with a brain cell imagine that he could father three fair-haired white kids? You could excuse maybe one miracle of genetics but three? I cannot believe that people are even stupid enough to be asking the question. OF COURSE THEY AREN'T HIS KIDS. MORONS!

                               So vegetarians are less prone to cancer huh? So blinkin' what? It didn't help Linda McCartney much did it?

July 1st

The heat-wave's here!  (27C) So much for my rant about the press, although they do say we're getting a heat-wave every year so they must be right now and again. (Even a broken clock is right twice a day). I decided to feed the fish in our pond this week. They've been in there for 5 years now without being fed so I figured they'd be getting a bit peckish by now. I bought a tin of Fishy-Munch or whatever it's called and proceeded to throw them a handful in. Unsurprisingly they weren't impressed and far from chomping on the stuff, they legged it (or finned it I suppose) under some weeds and wouldn't come out. Ungrateful little buggers. Well, as I was now the proud owner of a large tin of Fishy-Munch I persevered and now they actually come out and scoff it, so that myth about Goldfish having no memory is obviously wrong. On the same subject, the Hens are so incredibly food orientated they would cheerfully set fire to each other (if they could) to be first to get a bit of bread. In the world of Chickens there are no manners, no diplomacy and no etiquette, it's just every Chicken for herself, and if she can step on another Chicken's face to be first to the food, then that's just a bonus. I have a theory that a hen could probably be taught a lot of stuff using the food reward method. I think mine would happily learn quadratic equations if it meant getting some grub.

If you ever watch Chickens, you'll notice their similarity to women. I know I'm on dodgy ground here but hear me out. If you have Chickens, watch how one negotiates obstacles in its path and then remember the last time you watched your Wife/Girlfriend negotiate racks and shelves in a shop. The mannerisms are all there, the approach, the analysis of the obstruction, the indecision about possible routes, the (eventual) decision phase and then the avoiding action. It's just the same when they drive, (Women not Chickens) and how often do you see a group of women clucking to each other about holidays/Eastenders/Daniel Craig etc etc? The only difference is the Chickens are faster decision makers and lay better eggs. On a serious side though there is some actual truth in some of this. A university tested a Pigeon on pattern recognition in the 90's and it scored better than all their students. There's one obvious flaw there. They were students. A Toasted Teacake would probably have been a better mental adversary.

A very lucky person I know has just taken delivery of this. It's the (already legendary) Nissan GTR. 0-60 3.5 seconds, top speed 195. I was lucky enough to be able to park my bum in this and it's a nice place to be, believe me. If God is a man (and he obviously is because we don't have babies) he would drive one of these. You have supersonic performance without the shame of looking a complete Bellend as you inevitably would in a Ferrari, Lambo or Porsche, and you can be certain that anyone who's ever been the slightest bit emotional about motor vehicles will know exactly what it is, and will crash their own cars into items of street furniture while trying to get a look at it.  If you're on the motorway and you see one of these in your mirror, it's time to move one lane to the left.

June 21st

Got to fly a full navigation solo soon. That sounds like a trouser-filler. I've only ever flown circuits solo before and never actually been far from the airfield. I'm full of trepidation. What if I get lost? I could end up landing in someone's garden and asking directions. I wonder if my Tom Tom will work in a helicopter?

Still no sign of the scorching summer we were promised. Every year some clot in the newspaper trots out the same claptrap about a summer heat-wave. It's been 46 years now and I'm just starting to get sick of it. (I soon get annoyed me). My little outdoor temperature gadget is reading 14.3 C at the moment. Eeee it's crackin' t' flags lass. That's got me thinking, how long does it take you to get annoyed about some niggling problem? A few years ago we bought a new fridge. It works fine, in that it is colder inside than out and it has shelves and things to stick your grub on. It also has a temperature gauge on the front which always shows -15 for the freezer and 5 for the fridge. One day this started to flicker. It was quite irritating because it always seemed to catch your eye. I think I put up with it for about 2 years before one day in a fit of anger I dismantled the front, wrenched out the offending circuit board and proceeded to map it out on the kitchen table to find out how it worked (or how it didn't). It was a crap design. I ended up soldering the board out of a mobile phone charger on the back of it to do the job properly and it's been fine ever since. However another year later the fridge has started clicking at the back somewhere. An annoying clickety-click sound that's like a valve somewhere. This can start anytime and goes on for 5 minutes at a time. A year on and I'm just getting to the annoyed stage again...

I tried to make my own orange ice-lollies the other day. Undeterred by the fact that Walls have had 100 years of practice and that they only cost pennies, I nicked the wife's favourite slender wine glasses, filled them up with orange pop and stuck some bits of mini trunking lid in for sticks. After a day in the freezer they looked just great. On trying one, I realised why Walls is a multi-million pound ice cream company and I'm not. Firstly they were as hard as Tungsten, and secondly just one suck removed all traces of flavour, leaving you with a piece of bullet-hard pack-ice to gnaw on. Tenaciously, I continued to the end but I've been unable to tempt the wife into trying one. My obvious enjoyment when gnawing away at mine was clearly not convincing enough.

                                                I don't think Walls need worry.

June 14th

It's been a busy week because my business partner has been on holiday in his Greek hideaway. We've now booked a week there ourselves as it will be a good chill-out later in the year. I managed to fly another navigation exercise but without any assistance this time so it was quite satisfying. My only problem is that I sometimes pick out too small a reference point to ensure I'm on track. There's the whole town of Wigan below me as a very large reference point, and I'm trying to find a particular garden gnome. On Friday I was following a Vectra on the motorway (In a car not a helicopter) when it promptly exploded and I had to drive through a cloud of what I thought was smoke before it coasted off on to die on the hard shoulder. It then became apparent that it was oil, not smoke as my windscreen wipers couldn't get this stuff off. It took some time when I got home to scrub Vauxhall-blood off the entire front of my car. It made me think though, aren't modern cars reliable? As an engineer I think about all those pistons and valves thrashing around and I can only marvel at how clever the people are who design these intricate things with hundreds of moving parts, that run for thousands of hours without exploding. I see fifteen year old cars burning past in lane three doing 90 MPH and if it were me I'd be fretting about my big ends or something and the fact that I might end up collecting my engine parts in carrier bags. I even fret about my Volvo which is only 4 years old with 120 K on the clock, when Volvo's are known for doing inter-galactic mileages. I think it's called 'mechanical sympathy' and it's something that comes with spending many weekends years ago fixing dead cars. Those weekends when blood and oil mixed on your knuckles, when you would be washing rust out of your eyes and you would need to have a bath in petrol to get clean. There were bearings in the freezer and carburettors in the kitchen. And of course the one day that you really needed parts was Sunday and the shops were all shut to please the God-botherers. Does this sound like nostalgia? Well it's not. It was crap, every minute of it, and I'm so happy that I can now send my car to the garage like other normal people.

Have you noticed that since people like Audi started sticking LED's on the fronts of their vehicles, that other manufacturers are starting to copy them? Love them or hate them I think they're here to stay now. There's a lot of debate in the motoring press about whether they are cool or just tacky. I used to hate them and vowed to switch them off when I got my Audi, but predictably enough I left them on. And you knew it would only be a matter of time before the boy-racers started bodging Maplin LED's on the front of their cars. I was followed the other night by some Vauxhall Zafira thing that looked like the B&Q Christmas-tree isle with strings of LED's bodged all over the front of it. I was desperate to get a photo but didn't manage to. Here's a tastefully done Hyundai Effluent though...

                                                  Cool huh?

June 6th

Well the sun didn't last long. Luckily I managed to fly the navigation exercise yesterday. It wasn't as bad as I had expected, what I was looking down at was quite easy to reference to the chart on my knee. I've got to do it all myself next time though so it might not seem quite as easy. Then I have to do it solo. I could end up on the front page of the Sun "Hapless helicopter student causes airport chaos". I suppose it's better than the usual "Drug fuelled drink-drive paedo asylum-seeker fiend in free mansion outrage".

You know, there comes a time in every man's life when he starts growing vegetables, or at least gets the urge to do so. It's not always practical to actually do, but the urge is there. I think it's some genetic alarm clock where the alarm is set for 'mid forties'. It goes off not long after the genetic clock that says 'buy a stupid convertible car and drive around looking a complete tool". I've lived through that one. Even my mate who is a similar age and who detests any form of muscle movement outdoor or otherwise has taken to growing chillies on his window-sill. (This is a man who gets his next-door neighbour to mow his lawn).

Obviously location can effect your plans here, people in apartments, who crow about the beautiful night views over Moss-Side and their secure underground parking are not going to be growing spuds. Allotments are a possibility though. Did you know there are allotments in London with a 30 year waiting list? If at the age of 15 you can anticipate a future yearning to fondle your own beans, you can get your name down ready for the middle aged onset of horticulture.

Some time ago I ripped out a load of decking in our garden that had been installed by some previous owner. I didn't see the point of it. It was green and slippery with a frictional coefficient  similar to Teflon, and had you chose to walk there you would probably end up in A&E. After some spirited surgery with a mini-digger it was evicted and we were left with the perfect place to grow some stuff.  My first year's effort was pathetic, our 'soil' is just clay. You could basically just make bricks out of it. I stupidly thought that you could throw some seeds on this wasteland, everything would grow and you would be enjoying platefuls of your own vegetables in weeks. Wrong.  You just get an excellent crop of the finest weeds (Why does nothing eat weeds?) so if you like sautéed thistles with your roasties you're in luck. Over the last two years I've discovered that plants actually need soil. And water. And fertiliser. And light. And protection. And a lot of effort.

Don't ever grow stuff because you think you will save money. The problem is that as soon as you plant things, there are a thousand pests that think they can help themselves to your stuff before you. Take carrots for instance. There is a carrot fly for heaven's sake. A special fly that just buggers your carrots. What does it do if you haven't got any carrots? Where does it come from? Where does it go the rest of the year? Whatever you grow there is something that wants to eat it before it gets to your Sunday dinner plate. Caterpillars, Slugs, Snails, Larvae, aphids, flies, even Pigeons. It's your job, in as friendly way as possible, to kill and maim as many of these creatures as you can using whatever deadly chemicals/traps/explosives/firearms are legally at your disposal. Choose well to ensure a lingering death as it gets your point across.

By the time you've added up the costs of chemicals, traps, explosives, a high power air gun, nets, poles, pots, compost, fertiliser and seeds, not to mention your time and effort I calculate that a sprout has cost about £144.76 to produce in your garden. There are however constant opportunities for double-entendres relating to beans, spuds, plums etc etc that make all the effort worth-while.

                                                       This year's stuff. A bit small yet.

May 29th

Sunshine at last huh?  Smashing. All the people who bought convertibles can finally justify driving something that has a tea-towel for a roof all year round. Of course there's the new metal folding types, very nice but they're not in the true spirit of convertibles. Have you ever noticed that the French who are not renowned for their technical prowess, solve the problem of hiding the metal roof by just bolting a huge arse on the car? That's like designing a mega-slim mobile phone then putting the battery in a rucksack that you have to wear on your back. Rare spells of nice weather fetch out all manner of bellends in different convertibles. These range from middle-aged bald men in Porsche Boxsters that really should know better by now, to desperate Chavs in clapped-out cars built before the Carboniferous period. The sad fact that all these guys can't grasp is that unless you're a woman, you look a complete tosser in a convertible. Trust me, I had a very nice convertible. The great thing about convertibles is you can hear people calling you a tosser as well as see them. 

                                                       French metal-folding-roof technology.

May 23rd

Well America has just shown itself for what it is, a homophobic bunch of God botherers, in picking Kris as its American Idol. Kris, who is undoubtedly a talented musician and confirmed God-botherer but with a voice on par with a good subway busker and a pretty face, won the title. This is in comparison to Adam who appears to be one of the most talented male singers on the planet but wears make-up and is gay. Their 'We are the champions' song with Queen said it all, Kris warbled his way through the low bits and handed over to Adam when some vocal ability was needed. I'm sure it doesn't make much difference though. Kris, although obviously a nice guy, will fade into obscurity and Adam will be a big star. Simon always says "this is a singing competition". It may start off that way with the judges in control but it doesn't end up so when the public have their say. It played out exactly the same on the X factor last year. The cute little Dormouse that was Leon, winning over the vastly superior abilities of Rhydian. Leon was later dropped by his record company and has disappeared unsurprisingly.

May 22nd

It's bank holiday weekend. Great. No work for 3 days. Laura finally passed her driving test this week after some failures and cancellations spanning a few months. Got to now dust-off the Ford KA we bought her months ago. The poor little thing thought it was destined for a life off-road (The KA not Laura). I've Still not flown anywhere as the weather has been the same showery rubbish that it's been all month. Getting your Pilot's licence in this country is a nightmare, by the time it's stopped raining you've forgotten what a helicopter is, let alone how to fly one. There are a couple of incredible shit-boxes driving round the area at the moment but I'm always driving when I see them. One is the most hideous Calibra you've ever clapped eyes on. Took the Subaru out last night and the bloke in the kebab shop came out to talk about it. If you ever own an Impreza you'll have to get used to people in similar cars waving at you and others who just want to talk about them. From the usual 'what have you had out of it mate?' to people who want to talk about fuel injectors, boost levels and engine remapping - yawn. I'm afraid I'm not good in these conversations because I don't 'see what I can get out of it' because I can read what its top speed is in a car mag, and more importantly I would like to keep my driving licence. The worst of these people are the professional Subaru-bores. They have apparently spent their entire lives redesigning Subaru's engine in their garage at home for incredible power outputs and know every detail about every nut, bolt and washer. The worst of it is, because you have kept yours factory-standard they feel the need to tell you how you can bodge about with yours as well! When I put my foot down in my Impreza I know it's doing what Subaru intended and that it's not going to explode in a cloud of very expensive smoke. If I want a car that has 360 BHP instead of 280 BHP I'll buy one that some Japanese boffin has designed in a laboratory, not that some guy has modified with his Halfords socket set on special offer at £29.99.

                                       The Subaru bore.

May 15th

Still not flown the navigation exercise. Every day that I have a lesson booked, the weather's crap. Got a few days off to do some gardening. Took 10 foot out of the top of the big trees next to the house and then dived into cutting the 'hedge' between our house and next door. When I say hedge, I mean jungle. I had diligently ignored it for several years and so it got to the stage where you couldn't even get down that side of the house. Fortunately our house is fitted with 3 other sides so access round the back was still possible - this being a good excuse to previously ignore it. Now I don't mind chopping bits off trees, they go to the trouble of growing in predictable patterns that are easy to work with. A big hedge is another matter though, this was 20 foot high at its worst point and was a tangled mass of Elder and some other twisty shit varying from the thickness of an inch to 4 inches. It was very tough going and I began to wonder what I had taken on. It was a rare hot day and I drank an entire six pack of Lemonade in an afternoon along with gallons of tea and water. As fast as I poured it in, it sweated back out again. It just shows, when it comes to ignoring jobs for years, I'm your man. After a 12 hour day I felt like I'd been run over by a truck. 

                                                  This came off one 20 foot hedge. Not the chair though.

May 10th

Planted some Dorset Naga Chillies I ordered from the web. These really are mega-hot and it's most entertaining to see people dying in agony after trying to eat one. It's worth growing them just for that. I shot a few Pigeons as we seem to be swamped with the things at the moment. One sat in the same place over the drive every day happily crapping, and caused me to go out with buckets of soapy water and scrub it every few days (the drive not the Pigeon). That got shot. Another appeared to have set up home in one of our chimneys. That got shot. Another thought it was entertaining to pull leaves off my newly planted seedlings. You can guess by now what happened to that. I put the deceased pests down the bottom of the garden and they would disappear every night. However, knowing that they probably hadn't recovered and walked off, I assumed it was a fox, as they are a bit big for a cat to cart off. Out of curiosity a stuck an IR camera out there last night and got some nice footage of a Fox cub who was not much bigger than the pigeon! At least my campaign of Pigeon death is benefiting someone. I like to think that staying on the good side of the local Foxes will make them ignore my Chickens. Well it probably won't but the electric fence is a good reminder, 7000 volts through your love-spuds always gets the point across..

                                             Remember Foxy, Pigeon good, Chicken bad.

May 3rd

Been for a nice day out round Derbyshire. Nice weather and nice places like Bakewell, Matlock etc to see. On the way back we popped into Ashbourne which turned out to be a shit-hole full of chavs. Too near Stoke I suppose. The only good thing was the ice cream van, which we made use of. One of those with the paper covers on the cones so you don't get any weird salty ice-cream-man's-hand tastes when you scoff it. Someone put me off eating the cones years ago and I've done my level best to put everyone else off since. It's only the same as bog doors. You diligently wash your hands in the toilet then grab the door handle and you've just done the equivalent of grabbing the last bloke's todger because he walked out without washing his. Off you go and wonder why your butty tastes funny at lunch. That's because it tastes of someone else's frank and beans. Blearghh! Anyway it was a great day and finished off by an excellent Italian at night.

Had to swat up for my flying today. Got a navigation to fly this week, weather permitting, so I had to write part of a flight plan. The peas I planted didn't come up outside annoyingly so I had started some more in a pot in the greenhouse. Planted them out under cover of course. I really am crap at growing things. The spuds have come up and everything else looks healthy enough. Cleaned the Chickens out. Has a problem with Red Mites recently, apparently common in hen huts and really difficult to control. They live in crevices in the hut and come out at night and suck the Chicken's blood. Nice. I read various stuff about controlling them and the problem is you can kill as many as you like with pesticides, but the eggs survive everything and hatch a new batch out as soon as you've gone. Unfortunately they didn't bank on me and a large blow-torch. Every week the hut gets cleaned out and I run a blow-torch around all the cracks and crevices, incinerating all life (and mite eggs) within. It's turned the hen hut from Red Mite Butlins to Red Mite Hell.  We also seem to have hundreds of bloody Pigeons again. I can see the gun coming out at this rate. Ordered some more Dorset Naga chilli seeds of doom.

April 23rd

The wife's birthday, did an early flying lesson lesson, got back and we had dinner in Knutsford and a nice walk round. The Missus bought another handbag for the collection. Finally finished the flying, now got to practice finding my way around the place and putting navigation theory into practice. I passed the theory exam ages ago and have forgotten a lot, so it's time to get reading again. I can't decide whether Marco Pierre White is a cock or not. What is it with that stupid towel on his head? He's not a freedom fighter, he comes from Leeds for heaven's sake. I don't think the barbeque will be appearing this weekend somehow.

April 19th.

Planted spuds, Broad Beans, French Beans, Broccoli, Sprouts, Peas and Tomatoes. Got back to the Helicopter training recently, doing advanced autorotations, S-turns and other engine-off stuff. Felt air-sick for the first time due to the extreme turns etc. Didn't barf luckily. Bought clean ex-plod Volvo T5 for moving shit around. Got brownie points with the Missus because it meant we could get a load of garden furniture :-). Busy at work, spent all week in a Health & Safety course. Had to poke each other to stay awake after lunch. Took some photos of the Scooby for advertising. It will be a sad day when that car goes because it's a really nice clean motor. Saw Lady Ga-Ga on Jonathon Ross. Whether you love the bloke or hate him, he's a true genius. She must be one of the weirdest people on the planet, but he handled her brilliantly I thought. On our Sky Plus: Hell's Kitchen, American Idol, Grand Designs, Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs, Bear Grylls, New Mythbusters, some rubbish called 24, and the usual depressing soaps.Actually got another barbecue in this weekend. perhaps it could be a good year...