Archive for the 'Rants' Category

All that jazz

September 30th, 2011

I have just been rudely awoken from my slumbers.

I was sitting here with my eyes closed, enjoying the scent of freshly cut grass from the garden and just thinking about nothing.  I then made the mistake of switching on Lyric FM.

I like Lyric FM.  It is a classical station that isn’t as snobbishly highbrow as Radio 3 and tends to play what I would call middlebrow classical.

As I said, I switched it on and kept the volume low to accompany my idle thoughts, but was very rudely awoken.

Some fucker seems to have taken over the station and is playing Jazz!  Instead of some gentle Mozart, Brahms or Beethoven, what I get is fucking Art Tatum.

There is a style of jazz that I cannot tolerate.  It makes my ears bleed.  It’s the type of jazz where four or five blokes come on and they each play a different, totally airless tune all at the same time.  It seems to be obligatory that there is a piano, a saxophone and a trumpet, and the only talent required is that they be able to play as many notes as possible without any regard for what the others are playing.

I have a theory that everyone in fact hates jazz.  They are just afraid to admit it.  It’s a case of the king’s new clothes where no one dare be the first to admit that jazz is tuneless shite.

I kept the volume on very low in the hopes that the presenter would see the light and play something decent, but no – all we got was Art Tatum after Art Tatum.

I have given up on the radio.

I would like to go back to my doze.

But my ears are still hurting.

Running through treacle

August 2nd, 2011

For various reasons, I have to use Windows at the moment.

I fired up my Mail thingy and the last mail that I had downloaded was dated last February.  That indicates reasonably fell my fondness for Windows.

The Other Fella tells me that this is a fairly good laptop.  He says it has a Double Core Processor, which sounds like some kind of kitchen yoke for mashing apples.  He says it has four gagas of memory which is more than I have.  He also said something about sixty four bits, but he didn’t say what they are bits of.  He’s weird. 

Leastwise, it is supposed to be a fast machine.  I wish someone would tell Windows that.  The fucking thing is driving me mad.  It is so fucking slow that I swear I could work things out faster with a pen and bit of paper.  It keeps nagging me about updates for various things and I keep trying to ignore it, but it is so fucking persistent.  It just keeps nagging on and on and on.  It’s worse than Herself, and that is really saying something.

They say that the majority of offices use Windows.  It is no fucking wonder that the world is in a state of chassis.

And the games are fucking crap as well.

Real money

July 4th, 2011

Back when I was a lad, currency was simple.

Coinage consisted of the farthing, ha’penny, penny, thruppeny bit, sixpence [or a tanner], shilling, florin and half crown.  There were notes for ten shillings, a pound, a fiver and the rest upwards were rarely seen unless you worked in a bank.

The relationship between the pennies, the shillings and the pound was very simple too. There were twelve pennies to the shilling and there were twenty shillings to the pound.  It couldn’t be easier.  Any child could, and did cope with it on a daily basis.

In fact it was all so simple we tried to make it a little more difficult by using English currency at the same time.  They used the same denominations but slightly different shaped coinage.  One thing that did piss me off was that the Irish were literate enough to use both coinage systems, but the British weren’t and would rudely refuse the Irish versions.  That was enough to convince a young lad that the Irish were far more intelligent than the British, but that’s another story.  Heh!

Then back in the early seventies, they fucked the whole thing up by introducing decimalisation.  It was sad seeing a tradition being killed off in the name of dumbing down but there it was.  We had to cope with a new range of coinage. 

That changeover wasn’t too bad and within weeks we were all used to the new coins and the over-simplified conversion of a hundred pennies to the pound.  Slapping down the correct price of a pint was no problem whatsoever.

Ten years ago we changed to the Euro.

I don’t know what it is about the Euro but I fucking hate it.  After ten years I still can’t get the hang of those fucking coins.  They are small, fiddly and a pain in the fucking hole.  Every time I have to pay for something I find myself twiddling coins to see what number is stamped on the back.  The coins are too small and there isn’t enough difference in size.  Fucking Mickey Mouse money I call it.

The sooner that fucking Euro implodes the better.

Then we can get back to the good old pounds, shillings and pence.

Real money.

In case of emergency

July 1st, 2011

Why buttons?

What’s wrong with zippers?

Have you never thought of Velcro?

But buttons?  For fuck’s sake.

Buttons on a fly are fucking lethal.

At my age I never know when I might need emergency access.

Fucking buttons!

Idiots.

Applied learning

June 2nd, 2011

I have a very simple request to make.

It’s not too demanding and won’t cost a red cent.

All I ask is that you STOP USING THAT FUCKING ABBREVIATION “APP”.

I don’t know what it is about app that gets my dander up but I cringe every time I hear it.  And I fucking hear it too much.  I started to watch a video about the release of Windows 8 purely because I had nothing better to do.  Every fucking second word was ‘app’.  I had to switch off.  I couldn’t listen to any more ‘apps’.  I received a magazine to which I have a subscription, but plastered across the front page was “APPS – Everything you need to know”.  The magazine went straight in the bin.

I think the main reason I hate the expression so much is that it is so fucking typical of modern yoof.  It summarises the obsession with fucking mobile phones.  It encapsulates the utter laziness where any word over five letters long has to be abbreviated.  It typifies the inability to spell anything longer than three letters.  In other words, I would describe it as a Neanderthal word for a fucking Neanderthal world

Let’s get one thing straight.  The word is ‘application’.  OK?  Got that?  That’s not too hard now, is it? You didn’t feel any pain reading that word?  Do you think you could possibly remember just eight more letters?  No.  Probably not.

I am hereby warning you.  Anyone who uses ‘app’ within my hearing is liable to get his [or her; I believe in equality] face smashed in.

You have been warned.

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