April 30, 2006
Intermission 6: Lamp
April 2006 Entries
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April 24, 2006
Signing off
Like the clown that I am I got up at 5.20am so that I could be at work for 6.40am and get plenty done before heading to the airport by 5pm.
Still, I did get plenty done and I will come back to slightly less of a raging fire than would otherwise have been the case.
I will be back in 9 days, armed with a raft of nasty diseases and a few photos. Meanwhile flanerie will resting.
April 23, 2006
Waxing Lyrical
Prompted by the wonderful Callisto, who in turn was prompted by a shite poll by VH1, who themselves were prompted by the need to be vacuous commercial weasels, I have been thinking about song lyrics lately.
Here are some of my favourites. A mix of the good, the quirkily bad and the plain odd.
I love TV and I love T.Rex
I can see through your skirt, I got X-ray specs
I came from the sky like a 747
I am bad boy baby, I fell out of heaven
Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction
What am I supposed to do
Now that love has gone away?
Take my breath, take my air
Release me from this body, I'll go anywhere
The Boo Radleys
On a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turn back time
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
Contemplating a crime
Al Stewart
To die for his mother country
Isn't every father's wish
But if you're ever feeling hungry
Feast your eyes on this
Bullied beat up cabbaged kids
To be patched up by the nurse
Who's carrying the baggage in
For the private patients first
And the doctor's praying to Buddha,
"Send me to another town!"
A shovelful of sugar
Won't help that medicine go down
As the actress said to the bishop
I stand accused your Grace
Of the seven deadly cynicisms
And a total lack of faith
Carter USM
She danced on my heart like Arthur Murray
Richard Thompson
Fashion crisis hits New York
I saw a blind man, he was eating his fork
He said, "that's what you have to do to be cool,
Eat your cutlery instead of your food"
The Frank & Walters
But I won't fight, and I won't hate
Well, not today
The House of Love
The sun shone down like marmalade
and covered us like glue
The Wonderstuff
You're an american girl
red headed, eyes blank
living in a freckle on the face of the world
another dying kid that learned too much too soon
you're not as good as your mom
but you're as good as dead
you're as good as dead
new jersey ain't the whole world
The Red House Painter
And you snatch your rattling last breaths
with deep-sea-diver sounds,
and the flowers bloom like
madness in the spring.
Jethro Tull
And those of us with ravaged faces
Lacking in the social graces
Janis Ian
People’s knees and trunks of trees smile at me
The Lemonheads
You can't say it doesn't really matter
This isn't TV, he isn't William Shatner
The Wedding Present
April 22, 2006
More on that ringing
I had my ears flushed on Friday, which is an odd but strangely pleasant experience.
Unfortunately, it didn't fix the ringing.
I guess the next step is to return to the doctor after my vacation. Of course, being in a pressurised cabin might cause my ear drums to explode and bits of brain spray across the aisle. Would certainly make it a memorable flight.
April 21, 2006
Happy Birthday your Maj
It is the Queen's 80th birthday today, gawd bless 'er
April 20, 2006
The carved irishman
I had a meeting with a supplier yesterday, a supplier from over the water, the Emerald Isle.
There were two of them. One with a round, very red and slightly jowly face, the other with an angular, very pale and taut face. Chalk and cheese. Or, if I may, chalk and beetroot.
One had an Irish name, and the other Italian, although both had tick (sorry, thick) Irish accents.
I was fascinated by this double act, but especially by the angular one, whom we shall call Seamus.
Seamus' head was large and generally square. His jaw line was hewn from granite. There are people like this in cartoons, and when they get into a fight someone punches them and their hand shatters. That was the kind of head it was. If I was going to fight him I would have a horseshoe in my glove. (Did anyone every really do that? Really? Or just in cartoons?)
Actually if I was in a fight with him I would kick him in the plums.
But I digress. On top of this head was a standing wave of black hair. It was higher on the left, and it didn't move. At all. Below this was a permanent frown. Not a frown, but a creased forehead. Whatever his eyes did his brow didn't move. If he ever had a face lift they would find a couple of feet of extra skin in his forehead, and a good part of that has never seen natural light.
You know when a kid runs a stick along metal railings? You could do that with Seamus' forehead.
The other curious thing was his mouth - a thin line in his face. More of a blemish than a gateway for food and bullshit. The mouth barely moved. Just the occasional twitching of the lips, a slight broadening or narrowing, perhaps the hint of a smile. And yet there was a voice - a normal voice, if a little hurried. Seamus would make a perfect ventriloquist, and had the Italian chap not been on the other side of the table I would have assumed they were a cabaret act.
Such is the crazy world of supplier meetings.
Of course, Seamus probably blogged that he met this weird finance director that wouldn't stop staring at him.
April 19, 2006
Ear ear
The doctor shook his head while sucking in his breath, then led me to an examination table and placed my head in a large vice. He then produced a Black & Decker cordless drill, fitted a number 8 bit and drilled into my ear.
After mopping up the blood he took a close look inside with a torch and said, 'aha!'. He then got a wire coat hanger, unwound it, and poked inside my head with it until he latched into something and then, using his knee to brace himself, yanked it out.
An old bicycle wheel! Who would have thought it?
Okay, I made that up, but I had you convinced well into the first sentence.
It was wax on my eardrum, and my attempts to shift it in the past few weeks with eardrops have just been moving it around like a deckchair. I am booked in for a flushing out on Friday.
My doctor is cool - he actually reads the notes. When I said I had an ear problem he said 'ah, we need to fix that, you are flying to South Africa on Monday'. Top banana.
April 18, 2006
The bells?
I have developed a ringing in my left ear. What the hell is that all about? It is midway between a hiss and a tone. It varies in intensisty and at its worst becomes ear ache.
It has developed slowly over the last three weeks and apart from the ringing, I can hear normally.
I will be visiting the doctor tomorrow and my question for the guy with the stethoscope: Why me and not Mick Jagger?
April 17, 2006
Bunny wars
In many parts of the world, people celebrate Easter Sunday by giving chocolate - chocolate eggs, especially chocolate Easter bunnies.
But in Switzerland, a row over who owns the right to produce a specific Easter bunny has turned the day a little sour.
Lindt says only it has the right to make its trademark golden Easter bunny, with a red ribbon around its neck.
It is challenging Austrian company Hauswirth, which has been making similar ones for 50 years.
Chocolate company Lindt has been making its bunny since the early 1950s and it is hugely successful. It sells 60m of them every year.
To protect the design, the company copyrighted it in the year 2000.
"Our bunny is magical, majestic even", Lindt's managers say, "and we will protect it."
There is just one problem, other chocolate makers make Easter bunnies too. And the small Austrian company Hauswirth's golden bunnies have, yes, red ribbons around their necks.
The two rivals are now squaring up against each other in court. Lawyers for Lindt say the Hauswirth bunny must change its colours.
They have suggested bronze wrapping instead of gold and a green ribbon instead of red. Hauswirth refused and lost the first round in court, meaning the Hauswirth bunnies could not be sold.
In frustration, the company began giving them away, delighting thousands of children across Austria for whom Easter came early. Now another day in court has been scheduled but not until June.
Let's hope the chocolate hasn't melted by then.
[from BBC News]
April 16, 2006
Happy Easter
Easter is the time of shopping, home improvements, gardening and eating chocolate.
As it is written in the Gospel of Darren:
"Jesus died on the cross and was laid to rest in a tomb. A few days later he woke up, gagging for chocolate, and bust out of the tomb. Then he went shopping and spent a pile of money he didnt have on stuff he didnt need."
You might recall that Darren was the one that, as Jesus was getting into his stride with the 'drink of my blood' speech, shouted out, 'got any more wine Jesus? I'm parched!'
According to an article on the BBC today, the average household will spend £434 ($760) this Easter, and that is just in physical stores. In England it is a four day weekend with public holidays on Friday and Monday, hence the big spend, although most shops are closed on Sunday due to some retarded laws about when shops can be open.
Looking at my own spending, I guess I am not very average - £78 in the drugstore (of which £43 on malaria pills), £15 in a supermarket, £10 elsewhere.
But I have been very Easterly in other regards, with the 2006 gardening campaign beginning on Friday and continuing yesterday. I like gardening, but only in small doses, and I will probably do another hour today. I have no idea what any of the plants are called, or what the need doing to them, but I act like I know what I am doing and the plants respect that.
And chocolate? But of course. A Green & Black's organic chocolate easter egg. Mmmmm.
April 15, 2006
Safari, so goody
I have some vacation time booked at the end of April but my original plan fell through and I was stuck for ideas.
So I cheekily emailed Miss Elly and asked if I could visit her in South Africa and incredibly she said yes!
That was at the start of the week and since then I have been frantically trying to put together an itinerary, not helped by all camps in the Kruger National Park being fully booked.
On Thursday I got a Hepatitis A vaccine, yesterday I got Malaria pills. Next on the action list is to learn some basic words of siSwati and to buy enough mosquito repellant to bathe in.
I fly out on the evening the 24th, so flanerie.org will be a little quiet while I am away, but I will try make up for it with some good photographs when I return.
Hopefully I will be allowed to bring back a baby elephant.
April 14, 2006
The Friday Photo: Mary
Mary had two lambs
April 13, 2006
Tax-slapped
Three weeks ago I received a hefty tax demand. By hefty I mean fucking monstrous. I had filed at the end of January and had not yet received a final assessment. The demand included some interest and warned me that the clock was still running. 'Better call the tax office and figure out what went wrong', I thought.
Two weeks later, with the tax demand still on my action list, I received a 5% surcharge notice for not paying within 28 days. Nevermind that is wasn't yet 28 days since the demand, and nevermind that there was no mention of a 28 day limit.
Still, it did spur me to call the tax office. I bleated that I still have not received an assessment on which the demand is based, that there was no mention of a 28 day limit, that the demand was outrageous and adding 5% was racketeering, and that it was my birthday.
A very chirpy James at the tax office took it all in his stride and talked me through the figures - 'so your total taxable earnings were X, and the tax on that is Y'.
'Wait, that's the same as the demand I received. What happened to all that shit you have been deducting through payroll?'
'According to the form you filled in, you didn't pay any tax last year'
'Oops, I am a twat. I paid Z during the year'
'Fine. I have adjusted that and the new balance is Q'
Q was still a big chunk of change but did roughly tie to what I was expecting. Curiously I got the impression that I could have given any figure for Z and James would have happily keyed it in to his system. It is self-assessment after all, so I could decide the tax office owe me $64,000. I guess the trick is to know how far you can push it before they pull on the latex gloves and audit you.
All that was on Monday. On Tuesday, by some exceptionally unamusing twist of fate, I received all the forms for the tax year that just ended, and the merrygoround starts afresh.
April 12, 2006
The food chain at work
A Chinese village splashed out on a fish banquet for more than 200 cats to thank them for their hard work.
Residents of Sanjiang, in Guangdong province, wanted to thank the cats for eradicating rats from their farms.
China Daily reports the village committee spent about £860 to purchase the cats which they released in about 250 acres of land to control the rats.
The move was a success and villagers decided to reward the cats for the good harvest they expect this year as a result.
The village suffered a rat infestation after snakes were caught and slaughtered by local residents in previous years.
[from ananova]
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Apart from the quaint image of a banquetting table laid out with the ultimate fish supper, and cats wearing napkins, this is also a nice lesson in cause-and-effect. Snakes kill rats. If you kill snakes you then need to kill the rats yourself. Next year I guess they will be infested with dogs.
Posted by Gerald at 6:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBackApril 11, 2006
Birthdays, Women and Evolution
On and around my birthday I received cards, emails and text messages from:
Gran
Mother
Aunt
Sister
Girlfriend
Ex-girlfriend
Another ex-girlfriend
Female friends x 2
There is a subtle pattern there - no men.
This is partly because men don't give a shit, but mostly because they don't remember. There is admittedly a degree to which they don't remember because they don't give a shit, but the rest is biological.
Men aren't wired to remember recurring dates, but women are. Why is this? What does this tell us about evolutionary biology?
Does this mean that the creationists are right after all? Does this mean that women really are meant to be secretaries? Is a woman that forgets birthdays gay? Why was Darwin in the Galapogos when he should be been in a birthday card shop?
So many question, so little point.
April 10, 2006
Money for Kenya
Following this little appeal, I have today sent £175 to Elly:
£80 from Julie and Louise
£80 from me to match it
£15 that I won on the Grand National sweepstake
And today she is buying a cow, which totally rocks.
In other news, today is my birthday. Hooray!
April 9, 2006
$64,000? No thanks
I have become tired of hearing the term '$64,000 question'.
It is used inappropriately:
"So Bob, the question on everyone's lips is, will we get a dry weekend"
"Well John, that's the $64,000 question"
No Bob, it isn't. It's the kind of question you should be answering daily in order to justify your fancy salary.
It is also misquoted - the 64 million/billion/trillion/gazillion/bazillion questions. Enough already.
Some may counter that the $64kQ is pop-culture but I don't buy that. Pop-culture needs to be vaguely current. Using the $64kQ is like referring to Dr Crippen. Move along people, you are stuck in a tragic timewarp of your own making.
Try using, 'that is the important/crucial/critical/big question'. You see? Perfectly good words without needing to sound like Mr Jerky Jerkoff.
There is one exception.
I heard a media buffoon refer to the $64 question last week. No millions or thousands, just $64. How cheap is that? Imagine getting an engagement ring that cost $64. (If you are reading this from a trailer then the last sentence means the opposite of what you think it means.)
So here is the exception - use 64 in a derisory way, for occasions when the question is of buttock-clenching banality or irrelevance
"So Bob, everyone is asking 'will Jen and Brad get back together?'"
"Y'know John, that is a 64 cent question"
And that, dear flanerie reader, was a 64 cent post.
April 8, 2006
Dogs, crap on this
A German town hoping to be named Culture Capital of Europe has just noticed that council workmen laid a swastika in a cobbled street.
Officials at Goerlitz have apologised after the large Nazi symbol, which is forbidden in Germany, was laid into the pavement late last year.
It was done by workers employed by the local council to repave the pedestrian area and remained unnoticed for almost four months until a local resident complained.
A spokeswoman for the office of Mayor Joachim Paulick said: "This is a catastrophe, especially as we are hoping to be named Culture Capital for 2010. We will make sure it is removed."
[from Ananova]
---
A couple of angles here: firstly, I admire the subversive action of the workers, although it's a real shame it was a swastika. Had it been a phallic symbol they would have become flanerie heroes.
Secondly, the council need to show some creativity and reassign that area of street as a dog toilet or a vomiting zone, or something similar. I'm a genius, am I not?
April 7, 2006
Posh Nosh
Chefs at upmarket London department store Selfridges have created an £85 ($150) sandwich, to be sold in its Oxford Street food hall.
The principle ingredient in the snack will be Wagyu beef, a premium cut of beef imported specially from Japan.
Dubbed the “caviar of beef”, Wagyu has already proved to be a big hit in the US, prompting queues in New York for burgers made from the elite Japanese imperial cattle.
Also included in the sandwich will be Brie de Meaux cheese, thought to be one of the finest in France. Fois gras, black truffle mayonnaise, English plum tomatoes and red pepper and mustard confit also feature in the sour dough sandwich.
[from Retail Week]
April 6, 2006
Gene Pitney
I don't know much about Gene Pitney, but he is dead now and there seems little point researching.
The BBC opened up their news site for people to leave comments, and amongst them was this:
*whistles innocently*
April 5, 2006
Let them eat lard
Since last fall I have been hanging a fat cake from the bird table to provide my feathered buddies with fuel.
It took a while for anyone to notice, but eventually the tits did and the word got around – blue tits, great tits, long-tailed tits and coal tits. Not a bad turn out.
Then the greater spotted woodpecker appeared, and what a handsome chap he is – like the one in the photo but prettier. He flies in, latches on to the pole, looks around for a couple of minutes, then walks up the pole and starts filling his face with lard.
He never walks on the ground – when he leaves, he flies into the tree, walks along a branch to the end, then takes off.
And that was it for a long time. No other birds could manage either balancing on top of the fat cake or walking up a pole. But that doesn’t mean that the other birds weren’t interested in trying.
In January, after a few months of study, the robin finally figured it out and joined the party. Despite his otherwise antisocial tendencies, he has even accepted that the cake has to be shared and waits his turn.
In March, a male blackbird got in on the act. Robins and tits are small, a male blackbird is big, but somehow he has mastered the art of balancing on the cake – feet spread, wings slightly open and constantly moving to keep his balance. In short, he looks like he is surfing. Ungainly though it is, I haven’t seen him fall off yet.
And now, a female blackbird. One of the black dude’s bitches. She has totally not mastered the skills required but is certainly willing to try. This is her modus operandi:
- Stand on the ground staring at the cake while thinking, ‘I can do this, I can do this’
- Fly up to the cake, aiming to land on top of it
- Start thinking, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do this’ and panic
- While spiralling back to earth, grab a lunging beakful of lard
- Repeat until exhausted
As a spectacle it is as heartwarming as it is pitiful.
More on lard later on the week. I know dear reader, I am spoiling you.
April 4, 2006
Curried Elvis
Where there is light there will always be a dark side.
The dark side of commerce is corruption, the dark side of sport is drugs, and the dark side of politics is sleaze while politics itself is the dark side of democracy.
The scariest dark sides of all are in suburbia - swinging, coffee mornings, dog shows and Elvis.
Last week I saw Elvis in an indian restaurant and it has taken me this long to face up to what I did.
I didn't see Elvis in the way that people regularly see him shopping for groceries. I saw him perform. I paid money for curry and Elvis.
The restaurant concerned was the Dil-raj in Abingdon. The Elvis concerned was Gary Glen, one of the top 5 Elvis impersonators in England. I don't know how the ranking works, but here he is:
The curry house was packed with, mostly, extremely ugly women. Forget that line about falling out of the ugly tree - these women had been thrashed with an ugly stick, then punched with an ugly fist before being given a good kicking with an ugly boot. And they were mad for Elvis.
The uglier they were the more they sang along and whooped and cheered. Elvis, of course, encouraged them, serenading the most afflicted and doing that pelvis thing for their pleasure. Unfortunately one of the hideous targets of his attention was sat on the table next to mine so that when she was getting pelvic thrusts I was getting Elvis ass in my face. At least I got to learn something - Elvis wears briefs, not boxers.
Apparently blind people have a better sense of hearing to compensate for their lack of sight. If only ugly people could sing to compensate for their hideous features. Instead, when Elv made his fans sing solo, the windows broke and the RSPCA went on maximum alert.
But so be it. For many there, I got the impression this would be the best night out they had all year. Is this an indictment of them, of Elvis or of me? Whatever the answer to that question, curried Elvis is a great advert for staying in and choking on hamburgers while sat on the toilet. It's what he would have wanted.
April 3, 2006
Joke du Jour
Two men out for a walk wander into a graveyard and start reading the headstones.
"Wow, this man was 182 when he died"
"What was his name?"
"Miles from London"
April 1, 2006
Site traffic March 2006
Another big surge in traffic last month with a total of 4,190 unique visitors. I guess that means I need to apologise to more people than in previous months!
Actually, it was all down to my walkthrough for the Submachine Adventure, which was viewed over 1,000 times.
Google continues to deliver traffic by the shed-load - 1,800 hits in March - although the entire top 10 search terms has only two themes - Submachine and Getiffree.
Thankfully I still get mental search terms, and here are a few of the most tasty in March (these are the search terms that led people to click through to flanerie.org):
hung like a horse (that would be me, of course)
high heels crush a kitten
car wash in socks
beekeepers of massachussetts
kitten head went underwater what to do
how is the solar feeder of squirrel defence inc position in the market
why do kittens tails stick up
lambo pearls condom
I am not sure what freaks me out most: that people are entering these as search terms, that search engines include me in their results, or that people then click through.
Still, traffic is traffic. Now, I'd better get back to my plan for aquatic pachyderm world domination.
