Archive for August, 2009

Getting younger

August 16th, 2009

I just passed by the other laptop that Herself uses.  You know the one?  The one I used to have until it broke, and I hadn’t the heart to throw it away.  It’s all right for browsing the Interweb, so I let Herself have it to keep her quiet amused.

Anyway I couldn’t help but notice the web site she was in.

A fucking dating site.

She was off brewing another mug of tea so that gave me a chance to read the shite she was in the middle of writing -

“Female, 50 [HAH!!!] seeks 25 to 50 year old man.  Must be prepared to do house duties in return for favours.”

I pretended I hadn’t seen it and went back to reading the paper.

“Do you think we could have one of those open marriages?” she asked coyly.

“I thought we always had one?” I replied without looking up.

That shut her up.

Fifty, indeed!!

Do I turn off the lights when I leave?

August 15th, 2009

Having had a grand lie in and then a leisurely mug of tea, I decided to switch on to see who is around.

No one.

I have quite a few people in my reader, so I went to see what they had written overnight.

Nothing.

Well, that’s not strictly true – there were five updates when there are usually around forty.

So where is everyone?

Has everyone finally become bored with the Interweb?

Has everyone suddenly gone on holidays?

Has everyone succumbed to this mythical Mary Harney Pig Flu?

Or has everyone just gone to Mars with out telling me?

When I leave, will I turn the lights out?

Grandad has lost the plot

August 14th, 2009

I didn’t feel like doing much today.

It was a day for sitting doing nothing, so it was an ideal time to do a wee job that I have meaning to do for a long time.

There were a couple of little irksome things about my PC that, well, irked me, and I have been meaning to do a fresh install of the operating system.  It’s the kind of job where I can just feed the odd CD into the machine and then daydream while it does its work.

My machine has two partitions. One contains the operating system, and the other contains my data.  A system restore usually formats the first one but leaves the other alone.  So I carefully copied all the really important stuff onto the second space and started the job.

I had a fine afternoon daydreaming while my laptop gave happy reassuring messages about how well it was doing.  Eventually it finished and rebooted.

I went to load up my antivirus and Firefox and all the essential stuff that I had saved on the data area.

The fucking machine had erased both partitions!

Bollox!!

I’m back up and running now, and I’m not getting any of those irritating messages which had been irking me for some time.  I had to download my Avast, my Firefox and my Thunderbird, and luckily I had a backup of all their settings.

I have been doing a little mental audit of what I have lost though.

All my sound files are nicely stored on my Sat Nav so no problem there.

I have lost a moxey load of photographs that I had taken recently.  I can live with that though.

There were some statistics that I had been gathering for a while now.  They’re gone.  Knickers!

Worst of all though, The Book is gone.  All of it.  Not a trace is left. 

Back to square one….

Fuck!

*sigh*

Guinness shows us how not to drink Guinness

August 13th, 2009

There are times when I am utterly speechless.

There is an advertisement that is being pumped out on a regular basis on television and probably in the cinemas as well, showing fellas drinking Guinness.

You would think I’d be happy with that, but I am not.  I am amazed, disappointed and frankly disgusted.

Here is a still from the beginning of the advertisement -

 Bad pint

What is wrong with that, you ask?

I would ask you to take a closer look at the pints those yokels are holding -

pint_closeup

Would you look at that state of that pint?

And to add insult to injury, the ignorant fucker goes and drinks it.  As it is.  On camera.

That is NO WAY TO DRINK GUINNESS.

There isn’t a single five year old who would touch a pint in that state and call himself an Irish lad.

The pint should be allowed settle so that there is a crisp line between the black and the white.  Drinking a pint that is only half settled is the kind of thing only a pig-ignorant fucking tourist would do.  I can only hope that Yer Man in the film was quietly put out of his misery and laid to rest in the local landfill, for his own sake.

Now if this were some video shot by some Walter from Connecticut and stuck up on YouTube, I could possibly overlook it.

If this were an extract from a film, I would dismiss it as a display of utter ignorance on the part of a director.

But this effort is produced by Guinness.  Yes – Guinness.  They are the very people who should be showing the great unwashed how to Down the Nectar, instead of which they are pumping out this shite which is going to confuse foreigners even more.

Poor old Arthur J must be rolling in his grave.

The end of the world is nigh

August 12th, 2009

I am delighted to see that the recession is well and truly over.

We are back in the days of throwing money around as if we had our own private mints.

This must be the case with our Council anyway, as they are spending like there is no tomorrow.

In the last few weeks they have spent a small fortune on paint to create a traffic island which [if you obeyed it, which nobody will] actually introduces a traffic hazard as it creates a blind bend.

They have ripped up a stretch of road down to the foundations and relayed it, simply because there were a couple of pot holes that could easily have been patched.  Needless to say, within a few days someone dug up a bit of it again, so the pot holes are back.

They have erected a set of pedestrian lights that no one asked for, no one wants, and that certainly are going to be ignored by motorists and pedestrians alike as there is absolutely no need for them at all.

They have half closed a very busy road in order to narrow down a pavement so that a cycle lane can be widened by about six inches.

Of course, all of this is being done by the council that spent somewhere around four million on a work of art.  They called it a pedestrian bridge across the N11 but they must be mistaken, as it goes nowhere and I have never seen anyone use it.

It must be nice to have so much money to waste on fripperies?

Or maybe they do know something?

Maybe there is no tomorrow?

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