How helpful

The Rhyming Dictionary's suggestions for words rhyming with 'wolves' were:

• werewolves

-and-

• wolves

Rhyming wolves with wolves. Genius.

This is for the joggers who didn't say "thank you" when I stopped and waited for them to pass

Next time it's walking in the middle of the path with my arms stretched wide.

Out-there Part Deux: Yeti Bar

Well my phone credit ran out today. I have had about five pence since about Wednesday, but it finally ran out this evening, listening to a voice message of someone apparently walking fast. If you sent this message, could you please explain it to me?

I had some important to messages to send to some of my associates, and I thought this would be fine since I get 500 free texts per weekend (7pm Friday to 7am Monday) I could just use these to contact my associates. No such luck. Every message I tried to send failed. Well this was rather annoying as the signal was strong and I technically had credit. So being the big tough man I am, I set forth to give Orange a right good talking to. Or my dad to give Orange a right good talking to. But you know, tomato tomato.

To talk to Orange, you have to pay, presumably so you have to go out of your way to complain to them. Since the credit crisis I (or my dad, but tomato tomato) couldn't moan at them. So I scraped around every nook and underneath every sofa to find enough change to so I could use my parents' credit card to top up my phone at the cash machine down at the local corner shop, Londis. After getting very dusty I managed to find £9.39, but I had left the house with the card before they had counted the coppers (MUAHAHAHA).

Now some of you might be thinking why didn't I just top up the phone by calling the free phone top up service (seems they make the call free when you're giving them money) and not leave the house? Well it was a nice evening and I apparently haven't learned anything from my last after dark adventure. So I donned my coat (off eBay but not the one you've been told about before) and set forth into the night.

I hate dogs, yet they seem to like me. Dogs see me as the ultimate snack treat, they would love to eat me. Forget what Pedigree Chum makes, or any other dog food manufacturer, what they need is to put me in a wrapper and dogs will drag their owners to the shop. You might call it a Yeti Bar. It's a nasty combination which involves said dog to charge at me (fangs out and all) while I stand still staring at it trying to figure out how the hell to get out of the thing's way, but actually found some prankster has put superglue on the soles of my shoes. And this is in the day time. Factor in darkness and my paranoia, and it's one lethal combination. For me at least.

Walking down to Londis I have to travel past numerous hedges which guard drive ways and it's rude to actually look down a drive way staring at some stranger's house, so I can't actually see what's on the drive. It's even worse for drives which have gates at the front of them, it makes me think "what is that gate designed to keep in?". But I can hear things, and this is where the paranoid jumpy part of my brain has an espresso. I'm a generally jumpy person anyway: it is with great shame I say that I was once scared three-quarters to death by my own reflection (any of you thinking "Most people are scared of your reflection too", this is Trevor, and this is Trevor's boot); if I see a cat looking at me, I'll be so startled by it that I'll jump into the road, leading to many many more surprises.

So I'm walking down the road, looking straight ahead to be polite, and some weird sounds start creeping towards me. It doesn't matter what the sound is, be it a rustling rubbish bag or my neighbours' sharpening their scythes, they are all in some way related to a dog which hasn't been fed in three years and isn't tied to anything staked in the ground. This dog which is in every drive way for the entire distance, is out to eat me. I am now walking like the ground is made of hot coals, but not running, I've got to look cool.

Finally Londis is in sight with it's beautiful, brightly illuminated front, I've got something to concentrate on and hopefully automatically filter out all sound.

I stand in the light for a few minutes, basking in its projected safety while I top up my phone to moan. When I'm done I turn to face the outside of the light and realise I've got to do it all again.

Keep your ear muffs on

Nitey nite.

I just thought this was funny

From 'The Wedding Singer'

Do you have any experience?

No, sir, I have no experience but I'm a big fan of money. I like it, I use it, I have a little. I keep it in a jar on top of my refrigerator. I'd like to put more in that jar. That's where you come in

You know a blogger is getting cocky when...

...he puts a counter at the bottom of his page.

Pop-upinator

In the war against pop-ups I'm a veteran. 500 pop-ups blocked and counting.

...because I'm a real man.

The beginning of that title is "I eat three Weetabix in one serving..."

The shanty town on my uvula has grown to epic proportions (I'll save you the picture), it has now grown to encompass the front side of my uvula, the only part I can see, and has somehow bought planning permission to build a temple of pain. I can't remember the last time I had a meal which made me feel full (any of you thinking of playing the 'think about all those kids in Africa, how do you think they feel?' card I ask you how does starving myself aid them in any way? And I believe you know Trevor) since any food resembling food makes my tonsils quiver with fear. Weetabix has become a small glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

Weetabix with it's disolves-in-milk property means I can get some nutrition. It's my manna. It's like baby food for the grown ups, and is food for the geriatrics as no teeth are required to eat it. But what applies to me most is that for some reason it doesn't aggrivate the inhabitants of Painville, elevation 5' 10", population too many. Lace this with sugar and I might have a food stuff to get me through the next few days.
However, Weetabix does give me some thing to run on, it still makes me irratable at feeding times. The past few nights I've managed (with immense pain, but as I'm a tough strong guy it doesn't bother me that much) a round of toast for tea, which is suppost to last me until the following morning where I'll have Weetabix, which is suppost to last me until the following evening. And so on. It gets so frustrating how that food is so close, yet so far. All that food has got to do is pass down one simple short tube, but I can't do it because it hurts so at the choke point. It is amazing how much pain a piece of toast can cause a person.

I'll keep you posted

Yeti Olympics

My good friend Stervo has pointed out that this page lacks sport and has suggested this site
Yeti Olympics

Bon gaming

What has society come to...

...when garden funiture gets drunk?



I come home today to find this thing with all four legs in the air and showing no intention what so ever to get up again. From what I can see it tripped over the wall, off the patio and fell at least three feet into the shrubs below.

The shrubs weren't happy.

Getting this thing upright again took quite some doing, especially with that damnable cover which acts so well as a sail, no less than three times I was almost airborne.

Does this mark the start of something disturbing? Will the chairs compete with teenagers at the fridge? Will we begin to find tables dressed in newspaper in dingy corners in city centers? Will patio heaters bother people at summer Alcoholic Anonymous meetings? How long is it until a hammock swings over to ask for some change?

For now the hammock is now sitting in the garden, upright, taking some time to think about what it's done. Sitting in direct sunlight with a hangover MUAHAHAHAHA.

Me. Myself. And my uvula.

A uvula is a fleshy part of the soft pallet which hangs down at the back of the throat. It helps with guttural sounds in speech but can't be too important as some people have had the uvula partly or completely removed. It is formed when the two halves of the soft pallet fuse and as a result some people can have an inverted Y shaped uvula, or even more uncommon is to have two separate pieces of flesh. And against the thoughts of my associates (you know who you are), it is no part or function of any sex organs in either gender. Get an infection on your uvula, and it hurts, hurts like someone is trying to brand the back of your throat with the hottest, pointiest lump of iron known to man. This is a picture of my uvula in its present form.



That white spot in the center of the picture, that is sitting on my uvula. I say sitting, I mean squatting. I say squatting, I mean setting up a shanty town while a mining effort is made to burrow its way into my flesh using tiny pick axes of flame. That picture is taken as I am screaming in agony. Any food at or above room temperature feels like razor blades, below and every couple of swallows isn't too bad. At the moment I'm trying to perfect the ancient innuit party trick of holding a glass of ice water (volume, not the actual glass you understand) and a trout in the back of my throat for long periods of time. The ice water kind of soothes the pain, although steam has been know to rise from my mouth, and the trout thrashing about is entertaining the little ones in the sixth form center.

To try to evict the miners I've been given a concoction of drugs. There's some Penicillin I've been told to take, but these have to be taken four times a day on an empty stomach, or an hour before eating. There isn't a single occation when either of criteria are satisfied. And some mouth wash which is supposed to be the Agent Orange of the mouth wash world, except it's green. I'm knocking this back by the gallon as if you try to eat anything it washes away. Anyway, this is only day two of the treatment, so at my current rate it should be too painful to eat anything by tomorrow morning so I can take the pills. Yay.

I'll keep you posted.

This weeks tidbits from the wider world....

Shallow babies
Newborn babies prefer to look at attractive faces, suggesting that face recognition is hard-wired at birth than learned. Allan Slater's team at the University of Exeter in the UK showed paired images of faces to babies as young as one day old and found that they spent more time fixated on the more attractive face. "Attractiveness is not in the eye of the beholder, it's innate," Slater told the British Association for the Advancement of Science festival in Exeter this week. The preference for pretty faces might arise because attractive people have the prototype human face. If hundreds of faces are merged, the resulting "average face" is very appealing.

Let's hope it doesn't apply to blogs
"Dear diary. Worrying news today. I read in a magazine that people who keep diaries are more likely to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and even social dysfunction..." That is the conclusion of a study by UK researchers Elaine Duncan of the Glasgow Caledonian University and David Sheffield of the Staffordshire University. They compared 94 undergraduates who were regular diarists with 41 non-diarists. The volunteers filled in standard questionnaires about their health. "We expected diary-keepers to have some benefit, or be the same, but they were the worst off," says Duncan, who presented the findings to a British Psychological Society meeting in Edinburgh this week. "You are probably much better off if you don't write anything at all." Because the study looked at existing diarists, it is not clear whether keeping a diary makes people less healthy or if less heathly people are more likey to keep a diary. But the findings are surprising because other studies suggest that people find it easier to recover from a traumatic event if they write about it. One possibility, Duncan says, is that keeping a diary makes people dwell on their misfortunes. "It's probably better not to get caught in a ruminative, repetitive cycle," she says. She hopes to do further studies to see if writing about positive or negative things, makes a difference.

Clear history
The use of glass during the industrial and scientific revolutions was what seperated western civilisation from the rest of the world in the 17th and 18th centuries. Progress in everything from astronomy to medicine to modern genetics would have been impossible without it, an anthropologist is claiming. Without glass, there would be no microscopes or telescopes. Louis Pasteur would not have identified infectious diseases and launched a medical revolution. Biologists could not have observed cell division, understood chromosomes, or unravelled DNA's structure, leaving us bereft of modern genetics. Much of Galileo's work on the solar system would have been restricted to philosophy. And while it mat seem unlikely, glass even helped in the invention of the steam engine, says Alan Macfarlane of the University of Cambridge. It was essential to the barometer, manometer, thermometer and air pump, inventions that allowed Jacques Charles and Robert Boyle to derive the laws linking volume of a gas to its pressure and temperature. This understanding led to machines that could extract mechanical work from expanding gas, and led to the steam and internal combustion engines and eventually the gas turbine.

from New Scientist Magazine

Red L me this. Red L me that.

W-HEY!! I am finaly seventeen years of age. This is an age I have been dreaming of for years. It's taken a long time, but I've finally got here. I'm finally allowed some freedom to go out into the world, a world were five miles isn't that far. I'm finally allowed to drive!!

Calm down dear, it's not that simple. 40 hours of driving lessons. Insurance. Fluffy dice. An actual car. Total cost, almost £4000. Trevor pick your jaw up off the floor.

Your average driving lesson could cost £25 an hour, multiply this by 40 hours and you've got £1000 excluding testing. Because teenagers are the irresponsible bastards everyone would like to believe, car insurance for a 17 year old is almost £2000, and this is just for a learner driver, if you buy an old banger the insurance generously goes down to about £1700. When you actually learn to drive, the insurance goes up because there isn't a 'more responsible' in the car with you. That's £2300 you have to pay before you even get in the car. Then there's the fuel. And the fluffy dice. And the servicing for the old banger you bought to lower the price of your learning insurance.

To get a job you need a degree in advanced particle physics which will probably get you the pretigious job of flipping burgers in the local greasy spoon. To get a degree in advanced particle physics you need to go to university. To get into university you need to go to college or sixth form. To stay in college or sixth form you need to study and not work. So unless you are destined to inherit a minor soverein state it is unlikely that four grand will find it's way to you while you are still seventeen. Sure, some of my associates are driving and have jobs, but they probably know the combination to the store safe and so this doesn't count.

So until I have my degree in something which title contains words I don't know exist, I will have to wait about another ten years before I can legaly sit behind a steering wheel. In which time the only thing I'll be able to do with my licence is take very strange photos with it.



Keep truckin'

Nitey nite.

Evul

In this world there is undoubtedly terrible evil. There are some people in this world that will do anything to have more power, more money and more land no matter the cost in resources and human lives. And then there are the powers which make their money and power by feeding off this evil and/or carnage, most notably the news companies. When there was the land slide in Boscastle you could switch over to BBC News 24 and you could get live video footage of the scene. What advantage could this possible give to the viewing public except something real to gorp at? The news companies are there to offer information from around the world. Fine this is what they are doing, but they do it in such an emotive way as to cause more hate and fear in the viewing public. After 9/11 we are led to believe there is practically an al-Qaeda threat around every turn. When 'Batman' scaled the walls of Buckingham palace, 15 minutes, or half the program, was dedicated to how 'Batman' could have been an al-Qaeda suicide bomber, trying to blow up a residentless palace. If these al-Qaeda members are as fanatical as we are led to believe (by news media) would this man dress up as a western super hero to do 'Allah's work'?

Other sources of fear are documentaries, at least some of them. Why make a documentary of our impending doom of a meteor crashing into the earth? A program telling us billions will die and the few surviving super humans (kinda rules out the western world ooooh is that a McDonalds?) will have to endure a new ice age and will generally end up having a very uncomfortable life? If a meteor were to crash into the earth, or America as the documentary says, who's going to know about it? Why make people worry about it? Documentaries on global warming turning the earth into a cosmic doner kebab. Documentaries on biological weapons melting the skin off our bones. Documentaries of tidal waves destroying the coast and everything 50 miles inland. Why make people scared?

Sex sells. But not exclusively, fear is as big a selling point as sex. It appeals to our most basic of chimp thoughts. Avoid the danger. Make babies. Evolution's rules. And so this is the perfect product, nothing gets the money rolling in like sex or danger, the news media covering the fear, Playboy covering the sex. In a way they compliment each other, the opposite ends of the spectrum. However, as one is taboo and the other one for responsible mature people to take an interest, the carnage wins by getting more coverage. Maybe this is why a man would rather go to war and risk getting killed, than stay at home and make love to his wife. He feels like he is making a stand against this evil and being honourable etc, but in reality he adds to the vicious circle of fear.

Keep your chin up

Nitey nite.

Mont Bromsgrove

We're now into September, summer is quiet literally history. Summer ends at August 31st, and as that minute hand kisses 12 on the clock for midnight the sun jumps away from the earth and the rain begins. Yet just a few days ago I saw this weather forecast on the BBC:



The temperatures were somewhere around Mercury and humidity was at 234%. The master of the understatement that I am says that this was a little unpleasant (particularly when I have to walk two miles to get home all up hill, but that's a different moan).

I hate heat. Simple as that. I'd rather be able to choose when I feel this heat, which wouldn't be often, instead of it being imposed on me, this is why I propose a plan which will turn that forecast into one that looks like this:



All this requires is a couple of planes, a decent size chainsaw and the population of Sweden turning their heads for five minutes. Simply cut a Bromsgrove shaped chunk out of Sweden, fly it over the North Sea and delicately place it down these lands we call Mid. All this and you could turn Bromsgrove into a nicely chilled home full of snow, which everyone likes. Some of the finer details would have to be worked out later, but I think this is a plan that could work.




And about that walk home you ask? No problem. There will be a chair lift then.

Nitey nite

'lol' junkies

lol junkies are a breed of internet users I cannot stand. They come from the same kind of set as Caps Lock junkies THAT TALK LIKE THIS. And anti-comprehension junkies WhIcH TyPe LiKe tHis. They are people that inhabit IM conversations and internet forums and any other medium which the human race are allowed to post on. These people believe the 'lol' abbreviation is as essential as the space key. They must be stopped.
Lets look at what the individual letters mean:

L: the first L; laugh. The action of expressing humour in a visual and audio manner

O: out. Of not being inside a container

L: the second L; loud. The volume of audio expressions and/or media.Brought together 'lol' stands for 'laugh out loud'.

This can be very usful when conversing via instant messeging (especially for guys who rely on facial expressions to determine the mood of the opposite converser), when you tell a good joke or if you are being cheeky it shows that the comment has been understood and has not caused offence, in such a case the 'lol' might be followed by a :O or associated emoticon to fein offence.

However, 'lol's can be missed used. For example here is a conversation I had on MSN
Messenger:

lol junkie: Hi
Me: hi
lol junkie: lol
lol junkie: how are you?
Me: good. you?
lol junkie: lol
lol junkie: not bad
Me: up to much?
lol junkie: lol
lol junkie: no, you?

And so on and so forth.

Ok, its not dazzaling conversation but how could I try to start off anything interesting when my mind is occupied trying to work out why 'hi' was so funny. Most of the conversation went on like this meaning I was getting rather annoyed and so giving fewer and fewer reasons for someone to actually laugh out loud.

If you're going to show that something is funny at least see if you actually laughed out loud. If not why not say 'haha' or use the :P emoticon? Otherwise 'lol' just becomes another useless phrase, like swear words which were expletives but now are used to link up less offensive words: "Yo bitch this shit is fucking good" or in English, "Wow mum, this cup of tea is really nice".

If you're not laughing out loud, laughing your ass off, laughing your fucking ass off, or rolling on the floor laughing don't say it. If you are laughing out loud, laughing you ass off, laughing your fucking ass off or rolling on the floor laughing, say it (or say it when you get off the floor and/or reassemble yourself).

Drop your lol junkie ways and allow the males to understand you. Do it or I'll send Trevor round.

Keep typing.

Nitey nite.

Update

I will write something new eventually. Just got to get round to it.

Wikipedia

This site is quite amazing. It's a god send to people to love to flick randomly through encyclopedia's (helped by the random page button)

This weeks tidbits from the wider world....

Poo Permit
Are migratory birds helping to spread the H5N1 bird flu devastating east Asian poultry flocks? And could they carry it as far as Australia? A study to find out by analyzing droppings from migratory birds that return to Queensland's Heron Island each summer could be delayed for a year by bureaucratic wrangling. Renowned flu expert Graeme Laver, formerly of the Australian National University, planned to collect fresh droppings using no more than a plastic sheet. This week he received a permit from Queensland Parks and Wildlife service, only to be told by the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries that he will be liable for prosecution unless he gets approval from the department's animal ethics committee, which could take months. "It's ridiculous, all we want to do is collect bird poo," says Laver. He claims the authorities fear finding H5N1 will deter tourists, while they say they are merely following the rules.

Back jaw
A jawbone grown in the back of a man disfigured by cancer surgery has allowed him to eat solid food for the first time in nine years. Patrick Warnke's team at the University of Kiel, Germany, seeded a titanium scaffold with bone minerals and bone marrow cells, grew it in a shoulder muscle for seven weeks and the implanted it, they report in The Lancet.

Tokyo village
There is a 90 per cent chance that Tokyo will be devastated by a magnitude 7 earthquake in the next 50 years. Japan's Earthquake Research Committee made the prediction on 23 August based on an analysis of data from the five quakes of magnitude 6.7 to 7.2 that have struck the Tokyo region since 1885.

Round beg in round hole. Round peg out of square hole.
"The mind boggles that scientists...could have chucked highly active waste into silos with no thought as to how to get it out." Chief nuclear safety inspector Laurence Williams on how radioactive waste imported for reprocessing is stored in the UK

Extra protein
"There are hazards that are more of a problem than the minor issues associated with foreign genes... Rats get into grain silos and get processed during milling" Food safety scientist Guill Le Roux of AgResearch in New Zealand on genetically modified food.

Questions they can't answer

1. How did life begin?
2. How many species are there?
3. Are we still evolving?
4. Why do we sleep?
5. Is intelligence inevitable?
6. What is consciousness?
7. What is sex for?
8. Can we prevent ageing?
9. What is life?
10. Is there life on other planets?

Answers on a 1420 megahertz carrier signal to....

from New Scientist Magazine

If Hollywood was a religion, this would be it's God

The Internet Movie Database

Hair vs Photography

Ahh photography, the one thing I think I'm genuinely half decent at, the art of writing a thousand words in half a millisecond (although English teachers don't understand this so don't try to hand a picture in as an essay, trust me), a past time enjoyed by millions. However, this activity has a natural sworn enemy. Hair. More especially long hair.

Hair is vain. No two ways about it. If there is a picture to be taken it will some how find its way into that picture and stay there no matter what. It doesn't matter if you're facing the wind, it'll crawl its way round your head and slide its way into view. Get your pictures developed, it'll be there.

Due to my penniless unemployed long haired student status, developing photos will result in Boots sending the boys round, so I have to resort to the cheap-expensive man's digital camera. If you've been living in a cave lately these things allow you to preview your illuminated masterpiece before saving it and ultimately uploading it to your computer where according to the box you can "send your pictures to your friends and family using our exclusive software" (which has more bugs than a hobo). This preview function absolutely obliterates the battery though. Trying to tie your hair back before the camera runs out of a juice is a challenge as the hair some how manages to jump out of it's bindings to jump into the picture just as you're pressing the button. If any of you are thinking at this moment "why don't you get your hair cut" Trevor will show you the door.

So you finally manage to tame the hair by strapping a roll of film onto the back of your head and you're ready to take that once in a life time picture and the screen turns black with the words "Change battery pack" in economy white at the bottom of it. Not even a 'please', how rude.

Keep snapping

Nitey nite

Perfect partner?

A 'scientific study' has found that the perfect ages for men and women to get married are 32 and 27 respectively, a five year difference between the couple. Now if this is tracked back to my age (17) my female peers should be looking at men who are about 22 years old. However, the group of people I am scientifically destined to find the one for me in, are currently 12. My female friends might be expecting to be wined and dined and be given expensive gifts from a mature working man. My destined wife is probably expecting a Happy Meal™ and something pink and plasticy from Claires Accessories. They get a weekend away in the lake district. I get a night fending off with a hair straightner make up brush wielding tweenies. But one day we'll meet again and you're husband will run off with my ten younger than him wife, leaving us two again. So let's get together now and save the pain.

Bugger

In da hood wi mi google

Search: i am the boredest man on the planet

'Did you mean: i am the baddest man on the planet'