After a truly delicious home-made gastronomic extravaganza this evening, I bludgeoned Michele into watching the first ever episode of Peep Show. Half way through, one of the characters was eating a bowl of spag bol.
“Hmm,” said Michele, “When you’re hungry, that looks really good.
“But,” I protested, “you can’t possibly be hungry after that massive meal.”
“No, but it still looks good.”
I don’t know why I laughed so much.
Michele was convinced that it was Humphrey’s “official” birthday tomorrow and in order to “officially” verify it we turned to our normal source of personal historical information: this blog. Michele was a month out on her assertion, but after reading a few nostalgia-inducing entries I realised that this blog has recently passed its 5 year anniversary! Five years I’ve been writing bollocks to no-one and on reflection it seems even more worthwhile than I could have imagined. If you don’t have a blog, then start one! It’s good and everything.
Over the past few days I’ve been getting hangups on my mobile phone from an 0161 number and it’s been getting right on my tits. The phone ringing at all is a pain in the arse these days, but ringing from Manchester, where I know no-one, and then hanging up as I answer is more than I can deal with.
Today, in the office, I managed to answer it in time. The conversation went like this:
I hang up.
Now, I know I was wrong to have a go at this poor girl, it wasn’t her fault (probably), but that pisses me right off; selling my number to some bunch of crooks who harass me all week in an attempt to sell me something that I’m not even eligible for in the first place…
Tom, a work colleague who had overheard one half of the conversation, touched me on the shoulder compassionately and asked,
“was that your mum ?”
Watching Secret Army and the Belgian resistance sending messages to London by morse, made me wonder about the possibility of using morse-code over the Internet.
Of course… of course… it’s been done:
http://users.skynet.be/ppc/cw_channel/
CW over IRC!
Waking up in the morning, even with a hangover, can be the most life-affirming experience. Especially when you don’t have to work that day, you’re married to a cuddly bat, and you have a Dunlopillo. In fact it’s the purest form of joy I have experienced since I turned off voice-mail on the mobile phone. Mobile phones are truly evil pieces of work and yes, I own many and take at least two out wherever I go; this makes me a terrorist according to the recent alarmist government propaganda.
Years ago, when mobiles were becoming cool, I worked for a tech company that was moving into WAP. At the time my colleague told me how evil he thought they were because people always thought that if you didn’t answer, you were avoiding them. Well in the last year or two I have developed a hatred for them that borders on psychosis. People get genuinely angry if you don’t pick up! That’s outrageous! There are many reasons for not picking up and, quite frankly, just fuck off. The motivation for not having a phone-call at any particular time can be just as strong as yours for wanting one. At least in the cable days you could only answer if you were at home and, presumably, were in more of a mood to talk to people. The number of people that get the hump with me being uncontactable is increasing by the day and it’s beginning to make me wonder why they want to talk to me at all… If you really want to stay in touch then send an email or text and we can perhaps meet up in person and talk like civilised humans. It might be nice! We could even have food and a drink. Imagine that. You wouldn’t have to listen to me moving my bowels on the phone.
Anyway, Easter here has been lovely. An indolent, selfish, self-indulgent, avian-centric, family and friend based pleasure. We’ve seen my family, taken Humph in to a couple of gardens and spent time with friends. I’ve also managed to watch the complete Ripping Yarns and a bunch of Secret Army, which I missed at the time and now, thanks to Suzanne for lending me the complete box set, think is the best series ever made.
Happy Easter, and God bless Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson.
If you were really keen to invade a country, say Iran, but were already in dire straights as a result of two bloody, on-going, conflicts, you’d probably have to abandon the idea; you’d never get any support from your electorate because the other conflicts had been such a massive balls-up.
But what would happen if the country you wanted to invade suddenly did something outrageous ? Not outrageous in the sense of killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, like in Iraq and Afghanistan, but outrageous in a way that would rally the public with a few carefully written newspaper headlines. I mean, what if they suddenly kidnapped a load of our poor brave soldiers, who were only doing their job, and made up some ridiculous claim about them trespassing ? Suddenly it becomes necessary to teach these foreign johnnies a lesson, whatever the cost…even if it means invading.
Personally I have no idea about how the current situation in Iran developed but I do not believe anything I’m hearing on the news. This is way too convenient to be an accident. Why the hell would Iran, fully aware that America and the UK are itching to “free” them with massive firepower, suddenly kidnap a load of British soldiers in international waters ?
So, were the soldiers in Iranian waters ? If so why ? If not, why would Iran capture them ? We know that the US can easily bugger about with GPS, especially during the recent wars, and so what if this “misunderstanding” was as a result of either the Brits or Iran believing dodgy GPS info ?
We’ll know whether the UK government were collusive in the plan if The Saan suddenly starts getting all jingoistic about it again. I never thought they would be able to pull this one off but it’s looking increasingly likely that Iran will get invaded.
P.S. Apparently I got a letter published in the latest Eye!
Despite the alarmingly accurate description of you, my readers, here’s a report that refers to this blog, and that turns me on. I only hope that some overpaid nob-end in Thames Water gets to read it.
…between this Viz spoof of ludicrous government-funded anti-terrorism propaganda, and these apparently genuine examples of ludicrous government-funded anti-terrorism propaganda.
More information, together with a shockingly sober and detailed critique can be found on the excellent SpyBlog.
We can laugh now, but future generations may envy our ability to do so.
As you may know, I’m really into the idea of magic carpets. If you ever come across one then please get it for me – I’ll pay you back, honest. But I don’t mean any old rug that looks like a magic carpet, I mean a proper, flying, obedient magic carpet like in 1001 nights…anyway…
Thus far the closest I’ve ever got to one is watching things like The Thief of Baghdad (which is a really superb film by the way) and it’s not quite the same. But years ago Michele’s mum bought me a copy of Magic Carpet 2 which is a DOS game that was all about being a wizard and involved flying around on a magic carpet, casting spells and all sorts of good stuff like that. At the time I loved it but didn’t get to play it much because it needed DOS and usually involved shutting down windows to get it working. Over time I ditched Windows altogether of course and so it became a distant memory.
However, this weekend I found the CD and realised I could probably play it on my work XP laptop because, as everyone knows, Windows runs all of your favourite old apps with no problem!
So excitedly I installed it and then watched it crash the machine a few times and balls-up my (Microsoft certified) video driver…
But isn’t the reason people stick to Windows because they claim it’ll run all of their old software ? What a piece of shit…
The point: I found DOSbox, a free DOS emulator that runs on Linux, MacOS and Windows, and it runs Magic Carpet 2 perfectly on my MacBook!
So – that means that an open source project can produce a better DOS emulator than Microsoft, who apparently wrote DOS. Right, I see.
BTW – Parallels/FreeDOS on the Mac didn’t do a very good job either, but still better than Genuine(tm) Windows(tm) XP(tm).
P.S.
I’m serious about the magic carpet. If you see one, please get it for me. Really. I really do want one.
In case anyone was in any doubt about Bob Mugabe’s status in the Dictator stakes, he has thoughtfully adopted the standard upper-lip adornment made popular by Adolf Hitler to make his position absolutely clear. If only all rabid, power-mad, dictators would follow suit it would make identifying them so much easier. But generally they don’t. They grin, laugh, even play electric guitars, and look normal. In fact if it wasn’t for the maniacal glint in their cold, evil eyes it would be impossible to tell them from normal people.