Head Rambles

Grandad April 10th, 2011

Today is the day when we are supposed to fill in that grubby form the gubmint sent us?

I call it grubby because it is.  I left it on the window ledge which is one of Sandy’s favourite spots for having a doze.  Sandy isn’t renowned for wiping her feet when she comes in from the garden.  Heh!

I haven’t decided exactly what I am going to put in the form.  Some of it is so fucking obscure that it begs to be messed up.  For example – “How is your health in general?”  Surely there should be another question prior to this – “Are you a Stoic or a Hypochondriac?”  After all, a hypochondriac is going to declare himself as being in miserable health, whether he is or not, whereas the Stoic may be suffering from Terminal Galloping Knob Rot but still say he’s fine?

And what happens if a chap happens to get lucky this evening?  Before he gets down to business with his new found piece of fluff, he is going to have to ask her all sorts of questions about her origins, age, religion and crap like that.  I would imagine that would be a strong dose of passion killer?

I still haven’t decided what religion I am.  At the moment it’s a tossup between “Adorer of the Great White Rabbit” or “Jedi”.  Mind you, I would only go with the latter just to piss off “Supershadow”.  There again, I may just go with “Nun”, and let them work that out for themselves.

I wonder how they will reconcile the fact that I will be living in a 128 room bedsit and paying my local council 2s 6d a week for the privilege?

I am quite looking forward to this.

• Rambles
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Grandad April 8th, 2011

Times are tough, financially.

Methinks it is nearly time to revive an old business that used to prove very profitable.

All I have to do is get the word out that I am pally with one of the Driving Test examiners.  For €50 I can guarantee a pass.

The way it works is very simple.  You come to me and I tell you that I can fix your driving test for you.  You bung me the fifty spot which I promise to pass onto my friend.  Even better, I provide a money back guarantee.  If you pass your test, your fifty yoyos are well spent.  If you fail your test, you come back to me, whereupon I apologise and say that my friend was off duty that day, and I proceed to give you your money back.

Our local test centre has a pass rate around the fifty percent mark, which means I keep around fifty percent of the bungs.

Simple.

Everyone is happy.

Especially me.

• On the road
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Grandad April 7th, 2011

I have one of those up-and-over garage doors.

You know the ones?  Yup.  The ones that are always breaking.

I thought ours was a little on the stiff side and was getting harder to close, and sure enough, a couple of weeks ago there was a loud metallic bang and it collapsed.

Fuck!

Apparently what had happened was that a hinge got a tad rusty and was in fact solid.  So instead of rotating with the door, it stayed still while the door moved.  Anyone with a smattering of physics will tell you that immovable objects and irresistible forces don’t mix very well, and in my case lead to metal fatigue and a broken hinge plate.

i gave the rusty hinge a few belts with a lump hammer and managed to get it working again, but now there was nothing to attach it to as the plate was mangled and in three pieces.

Fuck again!

I toyed with the idea of getting a new door, but they look expensive.  I toyed with the ides of getting someone out to fix it, but who?  I would have asked Spanner to have a look, but he is away for a short while [he should be back in a couple of weeks if the parole board  are in good form].  Gone are the days when each village had a blacksmith, and the general solution to everything these days is to fuck it in the bin if it’s broken.

In the end, I decided to have a go myself.  I bolted a lump of wood onto the inside of the door and bolted the hinge onto the lump of wood.

It doesn’t look very elegant but it works.  Not only does it work, but it works like a dream.  Smooth as silk.

Total cost? A couple of yoyos for the bolts.

Total time?  I didn’t time myself, but less than an hour.

Total injuries?  One burned finger. It’s amazing how hot steel gets when you drill it.

Now all I have to do is find myself a wee slab of mild steel, so I can do a permanent job.

Who said that improvisation is dead?

• Around the house
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Grandad April 6th, 2011

It was quite nippy last winter.

We had record low temperatures, a lot of snow and a shed-load of burst water mains.  Because of this, our roads are not what you might call pristine.  In fact a lot of roads were pretty badly damaged.

Now some fucking idiot is demanding that the gubmint spend millions on the roads, as they [the roads, not the gubmint, though maybe…..] aren’t safe.  Here we go with the same old distorted logic – people spending fortunes that we don’t have on non-essential items, and using safety as an excuse.

I have been around the block a few time, and in all my years I have never been attacked by a road.  I have never heard of anyone being mugged, raped or murdered by a road.  On the whole I find them to be fairly placid benign yokes.

A road is nothing more than an inanimate slab of concrete or asphalt.  It just lies there doing nothing.  It is harmless.  It cannot be dangerous no matter how hard it tries.  It might be a long wide straight stretch, or it might be narrow and full of twisty turns.  That doesn’t matter as it is still as safe as a baby’s cradle.

What our fucking idiot fails to understand is that a road cannot be unsafe.  What is dangerous is the driver who uses that road.  Accidents are caused by people driving too fast for the road conditions.  If there are potholes in a road, then for fuck’s sake slow down.  It’s as simple as that.

I spent a few holidays in a house in Connemara.  It was a beautiful peaceful spot with glorious views out over the Atlantic.  To get to that house, you had to drive a half mile down a track that had long grass growing up the middle.  After the half mile, you came to a gap in the wall and this marked the beginning of the last half mile.  That last half mile was literally a case of driving across the fields.  There was no road, or even a track.  You drove over grass or bare rock.  It was hell on the car’s suspension, but what the hell – the trip was worth it.   My point is that half mile was not dangerous. It was rough on the car, but that was up to the driver to select the best route between the rocks.  If I had tried doing fifty [or even ten] on that stretch, I probably would have injured myself or someone, but I was sensible enough to drive at a reasonable speed.

So forget all this utter shite about dangerous roads.

Worry about the dangerous drivers.

• On the road
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Grandad April 4th, 2011

On Saturday, I was downloading some porn files from the Interweb, when a thought struck me.

They were very large files, so I left my laptop to it and did some other things around the place.  In the course of my doing, I passed close to the laptop, and it was then I had my thought.

I have one of those wireless thingies to connect my laptop, so every time I walked by it, millions of bits of photos of naked wimmin files were actually passing through me to get to the laptop.  That was quite an astounding thought but then I had another.  I connect to the Interweb using wireless broadband, so in fact those bits of files were all passing through me twice – one on the way to the aerial on the roof and then again on the way to the laptop.

It was then that I thunk a bit more and realised that wasn’t the end of it.

There is the electronic fence for Sandy.  That is sending out signals that her collar picks up, so they must be passing through me too.

Then there are the mobile phones that are transmitting to let the mobile phone masts know where they are, and the mobile phone masts themselves that are transmitting all those irritating text messages by the billion.  Those text messages may not be destined for my phone, but the mast has to transmit them all anyway, so they are all passing through me all the time as well.

We get about six hundred television channels of pure junk that come down from a satellite.  They have to be saturating the air too.  But what’s worse is that there are hundreds of satellites up there all banging out their shite to earth and are presumably irradiating my poor bones.

While we are on the subject of satellites, we  might as well throw in all those GPS yokes that chat away to my Roger [when he is working properly].  They are all transmitting their crap and I pick that up as the satellites don’t realise I’m not a SatNav.

What about all those radio and television signals that don’t come from a satellite?  They too are being pumped out into the now rather confusing mess of radio waves that are saturating me.

My penultimate thought was that if I could actually see all those radio waves I would be blinded by all the multicoloured lights shining at me from all directions.  It’s no fucking wonder that my brain gets a bit confused at times.  It’s not old age; it’s all the shite that is flowing through it day and night.

My final thought was why can I never find that roll of kitchen tin-foil when I really need it?

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