Superwater

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I think that I've discovered a new form of water. It can be found on the inside of my car windscreen at around 5:30 pm every night at this time of year. It is like ordinary water but it is impossible to mop up and appears from nowhere. Oh, and it is very hard to see through. Every night for the last few working days I've come out of my office, trudged through the dark and arrived at a car which seems to have frosted glass windows. I start the engine up and then spend five minutes scraping condensation from every surface, inside and out. Then I get in, drive 50 feet and find that the windscreen is now covered in my new discovery.

So I have to pull in to the side of the road and read a book until I can finally clear the darned stuff away. I don't remember seeing this kind of water before. It seems all thick and gloopy and you can't mop it up. There is probably a scientific name for it. I call it darned annoying.

I was quite pleased this evening (in a schaudenfraude kind of way) to see the car in front of me suddenly veer to the kerb and stop. Inside I could see frantic rubbing. I guess that I am not alone in my discovery.

Oboe Moods

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I'd hate to be an oboe player. Number one daughter has been watching "Dawson's Creek". Whenever something bad happens they play some drippy piano music behind an oboe solo.

I can just imagine the instructions to the soloist. "Now, as the steamroller goes over her I want you to emphasise this with the shift into a minor key...."

Happy bits don't seem to involve oboes at all. Which is sad (oboe music plays in background).

Dancing with humble pie in my mouth

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Hmm. Watched "Strictly Come Dancing" again tonight (rest of family likes it). The pro-celebrity dance championship is definitely hotting up, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to rethink my position on this. The way that they move around the dance floor is hugely impressive and the work involved must be enormous. And Bruce Forsythe wasn't in it much.

I think what I really hate is the grotty rehash chat show bit on every weekday night. But as for the dancers, they are superb.

Low Cunning for Cheap Comedy

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For some time I've had a Napster subscription. I pay 10 pounds a month and I can listen to any kind of music on my PC. I can also load music onto my tablet and listen to music on that too. Very nice.

Of course I can't actually do anything with the music that I've loaded, since it is protected by all that nasty digital rights manglement stuff. If I want to burn a CD I have to buy the music, at 99 pence a track.

I took part in a Napster survey and got five free downloads. But what to buy? I've always liked comedy records so I took a look at the Monty Python catalogue. Turns out that one side of some of the Python albums is one track. So..... I can get two and a half complete albums with my freebies.

Lovely.

Pimp My Ride Rocks

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When I get home from a hard day at the office I just love watching Pimp My Ride on MTV. The format is quite simple. A horrible old wreck of a car owned by some worthy individual is taken to a car customiser and given a serious going over. The result is average family hatchbacks being given garish paint jobs, spoilers, in car entertainment systems with earthquake power and even an in car water feature as in the show last night.

Wonderful stuff. The car customising gang all look deeply scary, but by gum they know their business. The MC who runs it, a rapper called Xzibit, oversees the whole proceedings with great gusto. I really like watching as these craftsmen do their stuff.

And the final point is that the folks who get their wrecks back as gleaming machines packed with goodies are soo pleased to have them. It really is a happy ending every time. And we can all do with more of those.

Gravity Sucks

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Not a good start to the day. This morning, whilst opening the curtains in my guvvy room, I managed to knock a bunch of DVDs off one of the shelves. The shelves are new, only put them up on the weekend. They are not quite straight, but I blame next door's spirit level for that. Anyhoo, the pile of disks fell with unerring accuracy on my glass plasma ball thingy. Which is now no more. Oh, it still exists, but as a huge number of tiny shards of class, rather than a single, spherical, item.

You would not believe how many pieces the departed thingy has broken into. I reckon I'm going to have to strip and clean the whole room before I can sit down and watch telly without getting bits of broken glass in my bottom. The only really good news is that I never used the actual plasma ball much, so it is no big loss. For some reason it sent the remote control on the amplifier bonkers, and I've already stolen the power supply for something else.

But I do hate breaking things.

Transparent Time

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We are having a transparency audit at work at the moment. This is all to do with working out how much time we spend doing our various tasks. I'm kind of finding it interesting:

"I did that in one hour, so I'll put down how long a mortal would take to do it."

"Phew. That was really difficult. I'll put down six hours for that."

So far this week I have worked seventy three hours.

And the beauty is that unless my boss figures out who is anonymous respondant QX1472J they'll never catch me....

Not Well Endowed

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Today we got a cheery letter from our endowment people. This is because, around 20 years ago, we were young and innocent (read that as stupid) enough to take out an endowment mortgage. At the time the oily salesman explained that this was a sure fire way to both pay for our little terraced two up and two down and also set aside a nice little nest egg for our retirement. What he did not happen to mention was that it was the financial equivalent of picking up all our money and tottering into a casino to place it all on black. Of course we did not care. All we saw as a way to get into our first house. So we signed up.

I was kind of hoping that since this policy (the first of three such policies- but let's not go there folks) had been going for a long time and would therefore pay out the required amount. But no such luck. And because of some chicanery (I can think of no other word) by the endowment supplier, we appear not to be eligible for any compensation. Ho hum. Perhaps the yacht will have to wait. I'd love to work in a field where:
  1. People give you pots of money.
  2. You keep some and go off and gamble with the rest.
  3. When you lose the lot you can go and ask them for some more cash and explain that it was not your fault.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Freezer of the Rings

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Some time back we lost the key to the patio door. We had three when it was installed. And they all vanished. This was particularly vexing for me because, being a far sighted person, I had carefully put one of every important key on to a master ring (one ring to bind them all I suppose). Unfortunately, as an idiotic person, I then promptly lost this hugely important collection of pieces of bent metal. I had this idea that somewhere in a cave some hideous, twisted, creature was going "I wonder what this opens my preciousssssss?". But the truth is far stranger than that.

Today, for the first time in ages, we cleaned out the freezer in the garage. For various reasons (the main one being idleness I suppose) this has not been done for some time. In fact, since well before we lost the keys to the patio door. And you will never guess what we found nestling at the bottom beneath a pizza box.

Oh yes, perfectly preserved - but jolly cold - we found the missing keys. Unfortunately, the patio door ones are now somewhat useless as we had the lock smashed off just so we could open the darned thing. The prevailing theory is that I wandered out into the garage to get something from ye freezer. This meant opening the garage door, which meant keys which meant.....

Oh well.

Subversive Presents

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Got to go out and buy some presents today. I'm not that keen on buying presents. If I am going to spend large sums of money on desirable items I want them to be for me. Not someone who won't appreciate them as much as I would . But then again chosing them is sometimes fun. I quite like to get really silly and subversive presents. One little feller of our aquaintance is going to get a set of tubs of things like "ultra sticky bogies" and "an eyeball in slime". His mum is going to love me.....

Takeaway Friday

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We are falling into a routine of always having a takeaway on Friday. We even have it delivered sometimes now, to show that we are truly decadent. But today I went and fetched it because I believe it is the role of the man to provide food for his family. And I'm too mean to pay delivery and a tip.

There are a lot of food outlets in Cottingham, where we live. Lots. This is probably because of the number of students that live around here. We have just about every cuisine you can think of. In one part of town if you swung a particularly large cat you could hit a pizza joint, Chinese takeaway, Indian takeaway, Indian restaurant and chip shop (oh and a hairdresser, but they'll make you a cup of coffee if you ask nicely). Of course you would instantly be arrested and charged with swinging a large cat in a built up area after midnight (well - you wouldn't want to do it during daylight would you) but you get the picture.

Best Laid Plans

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Some time ago I forgot my packed lunch. This is bad for two reasons, I get really hungry at lunchtime and then I don't feel like two meals when I get home from work. I now have a master plan where I put my lunch bag on my shoes so that it is impossible to leave the house without it.

Until today. I've discovered that if I lose that Zen like concentration that I must maintain between putting my shoes on and leaving the house I can actually contrive to leave the lunch at home.

This morning you may have spotted a wild eyed bloke in a red car at the traffic lights in Cottingham who suddenly uttered a very naughty word, followed by another bunch of naughty words, after frantically looking around inside his car. Oh well. I went home for lunch and ate my packup in the kitchen.

Brand Awareness

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There was a telly programme on Sunday about how brand aware children are these days and how intensive advertising is driving younger and younger kids into the arms of the evil corporations. Apparently even five year olds can spot brands like MacDonalds, Nike, and Pizza Hut. But they have not reached Gucci yet. I suppose it is just a matter of time.

Of course, as one of the more clued up members of society I'm not susceptible to this kind of brainwashing I thought to myself as I stretched out on my Ikea sofa drinking a Budwieser beer and watching my Sky+ box via my Sony telly. Oh no.

Half a Life

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Last week I got another video game. (there is nothing new about this - I've been known to buy a few in my time). This one is Half Life 2. I was a bit peeved by this game to start with. After being given whispered instructions to "meet me in the plaza" by an undercover chum in a fake police uniform I then spent ages in the place waiting for him to turn up. I wandered round, got whacked by the secret police, put some litter into bins and generally thought how lifelike the game is, having been stood up in real life as well.

When they had stopped laughing, my gameplaying friends told me that I had to find the ally, climb the ladder, jump off the fire escape and then make my way to another meeting point. Where I would be set upon and shot at by more secret police. Simple. Having got over this minor hiccup I am now going great guns. Quite literally. The air of realism is very impressive, the only problem being the loading screens.

Imagine that you are being chased down a corridor, bullets thudding into the woodwork around you as you sprint towards the only route out. Then your world freezes for three minutes whilst the environment outside the door is loaded in and made pretty. No fun. And then it starts working when you've nipped to the toilet during the loading and you get shot in the back and have to start again. Even less fun.

Braun Beats Brain

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My razor is broken. Not so that it doesn't work, more that it works when it shouldn't. I finished shaving with it and turned it off. But it didn't hear me and just kept shaving. Ten minues later, when I really had no hair left on my face and was getting a little worried about what to do next I managed to pull the plug out and stop it.

I think the switch may be broken. On is on and off is on too. Except when I bash it. I now leave it unplugged so that it doesn't wake up when we are out and shave the carpet.

I'm tempted to take it to bits and try and fix it. That way I can buy a new one when I can't put it back together again.

Canon Power

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Came into some money today. Did what I usually do in the circumstances - shot of up town and spent most of it on a gadget. But what a gadget. When I was younger, and even more handsome, I had a Single Lens Relex camera. These are great to use because you view the scene through the lens which is used to take the photograph. This means that you see exactly what the film sees and can use some nice camera trickery to make the results something special.

When I moved over to digital I had to forgo this because there was no such thing as a digital SLR. Then they were introduced, but at a price a mortal like me could not afford. But today I managed to afford one. They are giving me a free memory card and 100 pounds cash back. How could I resist. I got a Canon one, the EOS 300D if you really want to know. And it is like coming home. Only better. The SLR I bought around 30 years ago was very simple and manual. Select ths shutter speed, line up two needles, focus and shoot. This camera has lots of modes, buttons options and all sorts - as well as the all important manual mode. And you can see just what you have taken. This will really unlock my potential as a creative photographer. Or let me take bad pictures in an even more expensive way. I'll post some of the results when I get some worth posting....

Coming on Stong

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I was wondering if I've not been a bit harsh on "Strictly Come Dancing". After all, the actual effort involved in doing it properly is quite high, unlike things like Rap Music, and so perhaps I should be more charitable.

I think my aversion goes back to awfull "Dance Lessons" at school when conditions were too horrid to go outside and play rugby in the mud and so we got paired off with members of the opposite sex who were approximately the same height and taught how to foxtrot by the female gymn teacher who always wanted to lead. As there was nobody even approximately my height they used to find the smallest girl in the place (so that the averages made sense I guess) and then play wobbly records at us while we crashed around the gymn bouncing off the walls and hacking each others shins. Lovely.

So, kudos I guess to the ones that can actually do it properly.

Strictly Come Dancing

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Some things I like. Others I hate. At the moment they are showing the kind of program that I loathe on Saturday nights. Nothing new there I suppose, for many years now Saturday night has been a kind of entertainment wasteland as far as I am concerned. I think it is a conspiracy between the BBC, pub owners and DVD rental shops. Every time I hear the TV executives moaning about how few people watch the telly on Saturday night and how they are going to correct this with a new, dynamic, schedule I have to brace myself for another round of drivel.

At the moment we have "Strictly Come Dancing", which is a gruesome combination of Bruce Forsythe, B list celebrities and a ballroom which has all the attraction for me of having my wisdom teeth removed via the back of my head. The format is that C list celebrities are teamed up with ballroom dancers to compete each week in a knockout dance competition. They have rather cunningly added a charity angle in that money from the audience telephone voting is donated somewhere, rather neatly taking the programme above rational criticism.

But the even worse thing is that during the week, at 6:30 they have "Strictly Come Dancing Take 2" or somesuch, which is drivel piled on drivel. Nonentities are interviewed by a nonentity commenting on the dancing of another nonentity and then taking phone calls from viewer nonentities. So you have someone who can't dance talking to someone who can't dance about someone else who can't dance.

At times like this I wonder if I am the only sane person left alive in this world. Suffice it to say that if I got into the studio I would consider it my civic duty to roll a few ball bearings across the dance floor as the couples prepared to foxtrot or pas a double or whatever. Now that would be entertainment.

Serendipity Rules!

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Serendipity is my favourite word. And I only found it by accident. Had some today. I've been searching desperately for the registration document for Ye Olde Fiesta for a few days now. I've found all kinds of useful and interesting stuff. MOT documents from way back, school reports, you name it. But no registration document. The thing is that you never need these things. I put them somewhere safe and that is it. Thing is, I seem to have overdone the safety on this one. I've looked in all the sensible places and quite a few daft ones and still not turned up the crucial piece of paper.

I'd just about resigned myself to confessing to the folks next door that I'm an incompetent idiot where these things are concerned and then sending 19 quid off for another copy when a letter arrived today holding a new style registration form for the very same car. The vehicle people are changing the form and so the one that I have lost is now useless, and the new, posher one is now to be used. So I can post of my bit and give the other part to Dave and away we go.

Sometimes you can't beat dumb luck...