#15

Right. I've just been shopping to the supermarket with my Mother. Now don't get me wrong... I love my Mum but going shopping with her takes considerable patience and humility.

Why patience? Patience is required when she compares products at great length... if for example if she wants a can of tuna she will get a can of tuna from one manufacturer in one hand and a can of tuna from another manufacturer in the other hand and will read every thing on the cans, a section at a time, holding them both-up and looking at one then the other... seemingly for ages... considering value for money, quality, ingredients...considering... looking at the pictures, looking at the shape of the can, inspecting the seams and seals... considering and considering.

Why Humility? This is because my Mum has bad hips and general joint problems, and she finds pushing the super market trolley very helpful in getting around the store -- she can use it to lean-on for support. It's a very good idea -- she feels less decrepit than if she was walking round the store with a walking stick... but it has one side effect: i.e.: that anyone seeing me (6'2" of perfectly functioning strong long-legged biped) strolling along side her putting things in the trolley, must think I'm one hell of a bastard to 'make' my 87 year old mother push round a bulging shopping trolley while I'm empty handed and unencumbered.

Well at least I managed to stop her getting manipulated by a classic supper market scam. When trying to find her favorite spread (margarine-butter-y type stuff) it was not available in the usual, sane, medium size. But surprise surprise, they did have it in an absolutely huge size or a really small totally uneconomical size. Does that scenario sound familiar? Don't tell me you have not realised this is a scam! Don't try and tell me that a huge supermarket with all their buying power and smooth-running computerized stock control system, ran out of a product for which there is pretty-much a constant unchanging level of demand for? Ha! Pull the other one. And you're going to tell me next that it's a co-incidence that there also happens to be a glut of an equivalent spread in just the size you want that no one seems to be buying.... but guess what, this alternative spread happens to be the 'store's own brand' ... hmmm, interesting that, isn't it??? Watch out for this scam, DON'T BE MANIPULATED!! Go to another store, do with-out for a week, or buy an alternative that is not the one they are trying to manipulate you into buying. Otherwise you're their bitch int you?

I'm sure many of you remember the scam about 20 years ago when one or more supermarkets started to make the jars of their 'own brand' coffee the same colour scheme, and similar shapes, and the popular established brands so that you could easily pick-up their own brand coffee by mistake....ah but it didn't stop there though, because shortly after then for a period of about 6 weeks, every time I approached where the coffee was, there was an empty shopping trolley, seemingly innocently left in-front of the genuine branded coffee, so that it was just that little bit easier to pick-up their own brand by mistake (which was positioned right along side the genuine brands, unobstructed)! They did this with the bran flakes once too, and even I got duped! Upon realising my mistake when I got home I decided to put up with it just this once and try their brand (just like they wanted me to the bastards), but the bran flakes were so hard that when trying to munch a mouth-full of them, one of the flakes slashed my gum! So let that be a lesson to you. Buy super market 'own brands' by all means if you prefer them, but don't be manipulated into buying them by those bastards... you've got a mind of your own haven't you? Don't let them make you their bitch!!!

Needless to say that just after I have been to a super market any trolleys that were 'innocently left' about in this way will have been repositioned in front of their ghastly 'own brands'. Ha! Take that you bastard super markets.

#14

Well here is something all you poor innocent ordinary folk won't have experienced...Battenberg swamped in double cream. Some of you poor ordinary folk are so ordinary that I m sure you will consider it you ordinary duty to continue not experiencing this delight, so here at least is a picture of it for you.

N.B. in the above photo cream coverage has been kept to below 70% so as not to impair Battenberg visibility. Full swamping with cream took place subsequently.

By the way, in this 'ere blog, be not taking my condescension seriously...I loves you all really you know...including you poor ordinary folk :-) Indeed, what an interesting jumble we humans are. You are all most fascinating. Please enjoy being fascinating. Consider it one of your hobbies. Good night.

#13

Good barbie was had yesterday at Russ's 20. Barkfoot didn't bring any wild vegetation for eating (a fact that is perhaps disappointing to anyone who has read one of his recent blog entries about wild foods), but he did bring a variety of more conventional foods to add to the barbie spread, mainly: assorted chunks of dead pig soaked in some kind of nice red marinade, garlic infused mushrooms and tomatoes, and corn on the cob. So the sausages and burgers Russ lays-on as standard, and Barkfoot's BYO food, made for good eating as is typical on these Sunday evening barbies. Personally I no longer bring food offerings to Russ's barbies since Barkfoot brings loads and Russ already has loads layed-on, and in the past folk rarely managed to munch their way to my offerings, Barkfoot's being munched into before mine because they were always interesting looking creative food offerings: sometimes things on long skewers, other times ribs, and this time what looked-like (before it was opened) a bag of assorted human giblets in blood from an organ donor bank, but as I already mentioned, to everyones' relief, they turned-out to be pig bits in bright red marinade.... and very nice they were too.

Due to the bad weather over this summer this is only the second such barbie this year and even optimistic projections would predict we'd be hard pressed to get-in even half as many as in previous years.

Everyone at the barbie seemed in good fettle...Russ is settling into his new work-at-home job OK, but putting in long working days to make sure he makes an impact on productivity sooner rather than later. Maxine looked well and although I didn't see the twins (since they were already in bed) there were no reports of toddler-fun-spoiling coughs nor colds amongst them. The other (visiting) Russ seemed quite happy apart from having had his bicycle wheel deliberately run-over by a mad BMW driver on the mean streets. Timmy Town was looking a-head to starting Uni after her stormingly successful academic year just gone. Generally everyone seemed well and we all had a good feed, drink and relaxing chat. Perfect period, me thinks, a nice oasis in time and space...for those at the barbie that is: Sophie could not come to the barbie and was at home with a terrible migraine headache :-(

Right. Now to watch an episode of the Munsters I recorded earlier today. Excellent. Oh yeah ...and to anyone who dare say that the Munsters is crap and that it is just a cheap rip-off of the Adams Family TV series (as to my sadness Hermit once did): you people have no soul. The Adams Family is so up its own arse... The Adams Family is just for non-intellectual snobs. The fact that the basic character traits of the Adams family (that they enjoy experiencing or doing horrific sinister things) is, firstly, simply not sustainable (they would wipe them selves out within one generation), and secondly it is too at odds with the outside world: they just could not coexist for long before they were institutionalised. Where as the Munsters is much better: it does not take itself too seriously (even though it could since it is a most clever and most top quality programme), plus the character traits are that they only like the look of horrible/spooky/dark looking things -- they don't like actually doing horrible things -- the emphasis is on the aesthetic and hence is not self-destructive -- they are essentially a family of very cheerful, kind, well-meaning Goths -- thus this is a totally sustainable basis and is hence much more believable and hence more funny ... it does not require frequent crappy suspensions of disbelief that make the Adams Family unwatchable for anyone not in an inane snobby coma. So there. Oh yeah... and the Munsters theme tune is ace.



(Oh yes, apologies to American readers for the seemingly over use of the word 'arse' in my blog entries. To explain: it is not really a swear word as such in the UK, but, admittedly, it is a bit of a lowly word.)

#12

After my last post, during the later part of the week, people at work have been recounting the personal horrors of 'redundancy Monday'. A few people have told me about the intense frantic experience of opening and reading their potential redundancy letter -- a few seconds that seemed like an age from what they were saying, they told me how after opening the letter (some people with visibly shaking hands) they tried to rapidly scan the letter looking for phrases like 'we regret' or 'we are pleased to inform you', etc. but apparently there wasn't any common phrase that you could latch onto ... if you were not getting made redundant then within the text of the letter there was the word 'not' in bold print, and their eyes zipped straight to that and they immediately assumed the worst: that 'not' meant that they were not going to be working there any more, whereas infact it meant they were not being made redundant... so they had to endure a few more seconds of agonizing reading before they got the correct good news message. Some people around the office were crying, and some not so lucky were slamming things down on desks and storming about the office shouting. Not fun.

If you managed to forget about these personal horrors taking place earlier in the week there were always small tell-tail signs to remind you: like the comparative hush of the reduced workforce, and the pints of milk accumulating in the fridge due to less cups of tea and coffee being made.



Well, back to trivia. Channel 4 are launching a new Channel 4 '+1' channel. Hmm. I've had experience using '+1' channels before (channels that show the same stuff as the main channel but one hour later) -- normally what happens when I forget, for what ever reason, to switch-on my favorite programme, I remember some time later and switch-on just in time to see the end credits roll-up the screen. Disaster! I've missed the last episode of the series or whatever.... damn! -- I'm all disappointed, and regretful about how stupid I've been to forget it... I mope around for a while, and then do something else.... ah, but then it dawns on me that this channel, that my favorite show was on, has a '+1' channel! Fantastic, I think! Excellent! I rush back to the TV switch it on and flick through the channels until I find the +1 channel... just in time to see the exact same end credits of my favorite program scroll past, again!-- you see it takes me pretty much exactly an hour to remember that there is a +1 channel! So up until now +1 channels have not been any good to me. That is just one example of my brain being out of sync with the world of average folk. Actually, not just out of sync but completely in the opposite phase. Other examples that I can think of, off hand, are the way when I phone someone I take so long to key-in a phone number that I often get that 'number unobtainable tone' before I've finished dialing ... also with phones, but also with fax machines, photocopiers and all sorts of things, when you key-in codes or navigate though a menu there is often an 'inactivity timer' -- i.e. the machine waits for a certain amount of time and if you have not pressed a key in that time is assumes that you have bogged-off and gone to make a cup of tea or whatever and resets itself back to the starting point again... this is infuriating for me because I bloody well haven't gone to make a cup of tea, I'm bloody-well still standing there keying-in stuff but just very slo-o-o-ly. Some of you may be surprised that there are these 'inactivity timers' having never even encountered them yourselves. Over the years I have developed methods to get round them though, for example if I'm navigating through a menu on some kind of 'intelligent' multi function do-it-all photocopier, or some similarly ghastly device, I will constantly flick between two options, back and forth, while I think of where to go next, so that the machine knows I'm still standing there and not gone to make some tea. When using ms windows xp computers, occasionally when pressing the shift key, evidently for too long, I get a dialog box come-up which essentially asks me if I am disabled....well I guess, essentially then, I probably am. Well every cloud hath a silver lining I suppose, and this silver lining is that at least in the computer software I write, I make much more generous 'inactivity timers' (or employ some entirely different strategy)... also I have found when I, or a friend, are developing a video game I make a very useful play-testing benchmark where I represent the slowest, dullest, player that is likely to buy the game -- so basically if I can play the game and progress, all-be it very slowly, and enjoy it, then all my fellow lamos will too hopefully. Lowest common denominator -- that me. But what surprises me is how I can be out of phase with other people over much larger time scales... for example hobbies -- I'll just be getting-into a hobby or the latest fad, just when my friends are just starting to get bored with it. Perhaps it is because I consider things too much.


Also my hat size is: 8 1/2.

#11

Well, well, well. Upon returning to work today (Wednesday) after two days off, I was greeted by the news that 25 percent of the work force had been made redundant....and, that fortunately I was not one of them.

Apparently there was a big meeting on Monday where everyone (except me and anyone else who happened to be on holiday) was informed that there were big staff cuts. When the meeting was ending they were told to collect an envelope from reception with their name on it. In that envelope would be a letter which it would say whether they still had a job or not. So that was the way it happened for most of the employees... quite traumatic even for those keeping their job.

This produced very mixed feelings for me and probably for the other survivors, i.e: glad you have a job, but guilty that you have a job when some no longer do. These feelings of guilt were greatly increased when I was later that day, without any prompting from me, given a pay rise. That's a heck of a lot of good and bad in the same day.

It seems that the savings from those who were made redundant did not just fund my unsolicited pay rise, but also for the first time the company provided a variety of cakes for the subsequent general staff meeting ... normally we only get doughnuts for these meetings, but this time there were muffins and some other sort of cake too. Humm.

#10

Well after all that criticism of the BBC in the last post it's nice to focus on something positive, and that is the Radio 4 program about the arts 'Front Row' (7:15pm week days). Sounds snobby and elitist already doesn't? But it isn't, quite the opposite, and that's what I like about it -- it reviews everything from an opera to the latest Simpson's movie with the same importance, and the reviews are quite analytical and interesting -- there is such a variety of stuff they review. Arty, but not arty-farty.

I've noticed a change in ambulance chaser adverts lately. Now they not only depict gleeful claimants receiving their compensation cheques, and receiving luxury medical attention, after their undoubtedly successfull claim against their employer or council after stubbing their toe... but it appears they are also now trying to improve their image and appeal outside of their usual customer-base demographic of sociopaths and mercenaries by also showing some sort of corrective action that was taken by the sued party at the end of the ad, as a pithy one-liner epilog, and the inference is of course that they only put the problem right so that they do not get sued again, and that the litigation saved mucho more toe-stubbing suffering in the future. I suppose, actually this is sometimes true and civil litigation can sometimes act for the greater good even saving lives in some cases, but I still do find ambulance chaser ads a bit disturbing.

Sociopaths (people just out for what they can get who have no sincere concern for others' feelings or well being) must surely be a big winner of the new compensation culture, clocking-up huge increases everyones' insurance premiums with their bogus claims -- here the law is definitely working in their favor... this is very worrying because normally the law is the thing that protects us against sociopaths. Most of us need a bit of keeping in check by legal bounds, but a lot of the time we stop ourselves doing bad things that would hurt others because we don't like the thought of causing suffering, and if we do cause suffering we feel guilt which makes us all the more cautious in future. If we really have to do things that cause suffering we have to try and detach ourselves and not think about the situation, or try and see the people as just objects, but sociopaths don't need to do this, they already have that detachment from the feelings of their fellow man by default...infact they have to pretend to have concern for others when it suits them to be seen as compassionate. It is worrying to know that it is estimated that sociopaths make-up about one in 25 of the population. But as medical science progresses I'm sure researchers will, one day, invent a medical treatment that will give sociopaths the sympathy and even empathy that they lacked from birth. Perhaps some sort of 'wet-chip' brain implant. This will be a momentous time when a cure is found, not only because curing all sociopaths will drastically reduce crime levels, but also because it will be good for the former sociopaths because their lives will be enriched and they will have gained quite an important element in the whole 'being human' caper.

When a treatment is invented however it will be quite a problem finding all the sociopaths to treat. Because they are exactly the type of people who don't have a social conscience, and hence are extremely unlikely to come forward and volunteer for treatment for the greater good. They will also probably work-out that they will be putting themselves at a disadvantage by being cured, no longer will they be able to heartlessly manipulate other people for their own ends, they'll have to muddle through life like the rest of us.

Well I know one place where sociopaths can be located quite easily for treatment: the sales departments of double glazing manufacturers/fitters. You surely have to be a sociopath to cold call an old lady and then go to her home and pressurize her into signing a contract (as happened to someone I know recently)... and then on top of that, forge an entry in the company's phone log to bogusly show that the old lady made the first contact in order to get-round the 'cooling-off period' laws. These laws say that any contract signed away from the vendor's premises (usually your home) can be cancelled within seven days provided the vendor made the first contact. The fact that there is a special cooling-off period law highlights that this is a very very common problem and anyone who has watched a few consumer advice programmes on the telly will recognise at least part of the scenario... so I definitely think there is a rich source of sociopaths for treatment there.

I'm not trying to start a witch hunt here, I think we should basically carry on muddling through like we are now until a humane cure is found, but in the meanwhile we should carry-on tightening-up laws (like for the cooling-off period law), laws that apply to every-one. And just generally be more wary, for example: if your boss seems to be tormenting you and picking on you for no good reason then change your job as soon as possible, don't wait for him or her to find their conscience because if they are a sociopath then they just haven't got one to find... don't stay in the job long enough for them to sap your confidence making it difficult to find another job.

I think in meeting people, to form relationships, people should be very careful too, because if you fall in love with a sociopath it could ruin your whole life. If people were able not to get involved with sociopaths it would at least help natural selection reduce the numbers over future generations until a cure is found. I mean, I may well find myself being knocked-out of the gene pool for being shy, being socially inept, or whatever it is I'm doing wrong to still be single, so if it is going to happen to me why should it not happen to sociopaths who pose a real threat to peoples life and liberty? After all, the only harm I do is to put a bit of a dampener on the occasional party by not mingling sufficiently. Click here if you want to read an interesting article by Kiki Anniston about her experiences, it's written to help women avoid sociopathic men, and I'm sure some of it can be applied to either gender.

And click here for another interesting article on sociopaths by Martha Stout Ph.D.

#9

Oh what televisual annoyment: what is the BBC playing at having their weather maps of the UK in beige? They have been perpetrating this crime for a few years now and they are showing no sign of repenting. Let me put it simply... beige is the intuitive and internationally recognised cartographical standard for things like desert and beaches... why would that be I wonder?....perhaps it's because it is the colour of SAND??!! It has been even stranger over the non-stop rain and flooding of June and July to see a weather map that looks like the shape of the British Isles cookie-cutter-ed from a map of the Sahara Desert.



This crime is almost as bad as the one they perpetrated during the eighties by starting to say 'an' infront of words beginning with 'h's. You BBC idiots! Doing this if your style of speech means that you drop your 'h's is perfectly correct, but they did not, in their efforts to pervert reality they used 'an' and pronounced their 'h's crisper than ever. Now I have to suffer hearing decent, otherwise intelligent folk, every so often saying awkward things like 'an hotel'. Yuk. Could their pretty little BBC news-reader heads have been confused by expressions such as 'miles an hour' where everyone drops the 'h', or did they did they do it deliberately to mess with peoples' heads?

I'm not going to get involved in the classic argument about one of the worst and most cretinous perversions of reality, perpetrated by a certain crisp manufacturer... because the gets have obviously just used the salt and vinegar packet colour for cheese and onion crisp packets as a cheap publicity stunt, so I'm not going to fall into the trap of giving them a free plug here. I never buy wrongly colour coded crisps, and I suggest you do the same. It's the only way to teach these people a lesson.

#7

Ug. Took a chuck out of my left cornea yesterday while grinding-down a weld I had done on my 1972 Ford Cortina. On close inspection with a bright light and a mirror I could see tiny shallow crater about 1mm in diameter. Fortunately it's no-where near my pupil so it does not effect my vision, unlike back in the mid eighties when the company Secretary, Mandy, slapped my face and in doing so dragged one of her long finger nails across one of my corneas -- right across the pupil leaving slight but definitely a visible scratch on my vision that remained for about a year. I really cannot remember what it was that I said to deserve that slap... must've been a misunderstanding, must have been.

Sumpy the Cat has yet again gotten engine sump oil on him (hence his name). He seems to get it from going under cars and rubbing himself under the engine and gear box etc. He has quite mat fur (and not silky fur) so it really stains and you can never get it off completely. Today he has come in with blackened ear tips (the photo is after some initial cleaning attempts) but usually it's a big stripe of oil down his back and onto his tail. I think he got this trait from when he was a stray -- I think he used to sit under car engines of cars that had just been parked-up to get the warmth from the engine during the cold winters. Sumpy has retained a few more alley-cat skills too, despite finding a good home here, for example he gets very very excited on the night when people put-out the bin bags for collection by the council the following morning... he is out and in like a yoyo. I had my suspicions that he was ripping into the bin bags and stealing meaty left-overs from them, but I had no proof of this...not until that is: one night he came in and sicked-up a bit of bin bag along with some aluminium foil with some chicken still wrapped in it!! Guilty as changed m'lord.

#3

Oh no. The TV programme 'Diet Doctors' is on again, where they feed some athlete a truck load of, say, cheese, every day for a month to prove that cheese is bad for you, and make a big deal about showing him or her throwing-up or getting the runs, like ... durh! You can prove anything is bad for you like that. What a bunch of idiots. Look I'm hitting myself over the head, really hard, repeatedly, with a big bag of bananas until I fall unconscious ...owch, ow, ow, look everyone how bad for you bananas are -- beware: bananas.

On my commute home from work today I could not help but notice, as with every day, the clouds of carcinogenic soot that is spewed-out by all diesel engined cars. All diesel engined cars should be made to have the exhaust pipe sticking straight-up out of the bonnet so that the driver can not only see how crap their choice of power unit is by the brown clouds it spews-out but also so that they can breathe-in their fair share of the cancer causing agents and awful smell that the people in the car behind usually have to suffer. Thanks for poisoning everyone so that you can save a few pence on fuel, you're so kind. What's worse is that it is just such people who ram their right foot down at every single opportunity just to prove that their 'lovely' new diesel car can go just as fast as your petrol car (and hence proving that they made such a clever clever choice), and when they ram that right foot down ten times more shite comes-out the back. Look: you did not make a clever choice at all, and it only goes anywhere near as fast as an equivalent petrol car because the manufactures have had to bolt a turbo onto it and generally spend millions of pounds on research and development (which puts-up the price of everyones' cars), plus the fact that it does not have to have a cat on it which gives it an extra advantage. In fact evil diesel cars are exempt from almost all environmental controls... do you know why that is? Well I'll tell you why: firstly it's because diesel engines are such crappy technology that it's hard to control their emissions, secondly, at the time the environmental laws were being drawn-up by the government, the vast bulk of diesel engined vehicles were commercial vehicles, and the government could not have been expected to foresee that the number of idiots with diesel powered domestic vehicles would grow exponentially. If you own an evil diesel (and you're not having to use it because you're poor and could not afford anything better) then do the decent thing and take it to the scrap yard....or at least lay-off the right foot a bit, hey? Otherwise welcome back the fog and smog, along with the premature deaths for people with respiratory problems in a few years time. And say good bye to the clean air of the late nighties that society worked so hard to achieve.

Well, to my indirect shame, even my mate Russ has an evil diesel now. Strange because it is the first bad decision I have ever known him to make, he usually make stonkingly good decisions, like with his latest career move (see #2). No one's perfect I guess.