… And time for a sensible grown-up evening in, reflecting on the year that's past and speculating optimistically about the year ahead.
*sets up Guitar Hero and awaits guests*
Sunday, 31 December 2006
Saturday, 30 December 2006
FROM THE DESK OF MR AHMED SALISU BANK OF AFRICA (BOA)
I've just had a cracking email from Mr Salisu. Apparently he craves my indulgence and needs me to help him access an abandoned sum of over $10,000,000.
All I have to do is give my bank name, account number and my private telephone number and I can have 30% of the money.
I'm sure I don't know why I haven't managed to get round to replying.
Friday, 29 December 2006
Windows Updates
Updates? Bug fixes? Improvements, my arse!
I feel like setting fire to the bloody thing at the moment.
Thursday, 28 December 2006
20 Questions Is Letting The Side Down
One of its questions:
Does it weigh more than a duck?
And I'm supposed to know this am I? What am I meant to do: get the kitchen scales out and go down the river with a butterfly net?
Personally, I took that to be a Monty Python reference, yet when the thing I was thinking of actually was a witch, it didn't manage to guess it.
Wednesday, 27 December 2006
I Keep Seeing A Television Advert…
… For a furniture shop, where a female voiceover talks about how amazed her friends always are about her fashionable furniture. Apparently, she's always up to date with the latest styles and these friends wonder how she can afford it.
Just how frequently is this woman needing to buy new furniture?
What is she doing? Eating it?
Tuesday, 26 December 2006
I've Been Trying To Make My New 20 Questions Game Self-Aware
It asked me to think of something, so I thought of a hand-held 20 Questions game. I answered the questions as honestly as I could, and it guessed just about everything but the correct answer.
It's probably for the best. I don't really want it to deliberately fire nuclear devices at countries that it knows will retaliate.
Monday, 25 December 2006
Spot The Kids Who Got New Bikes For Christmas
As if anybody else is going to have looked out of the window this morning and thought, you know, this looks like a great day for being outdoors.
I'll get the rum and the space blankets ready.
Sunday, 24 December 2006
Thursday, 21 December 2006
Work Christmas Lunch
I went out with some colleagues for Christmas dinner today. The lady who sat opposite me at the table seemed to quite like gesticulating wildly with her cutlery in her hands whilst she was talking.
I didn't know whether I was supposed to join in the conversation or strike up The Blue Danube.
Wednesday, 20 December 2006
Bombardment!
The ferrets keep attacking the Christmas tree. It seems that I forgot the ultimate rule:
If they can see it, it's theirs.
It's now that desperate that I have to remove the bottom layer of tinsel whenever they come inside as a preventative measure, and then remain on careful guard for diversionary tactics.
I've already had one of them hotfoot it across the room with a silver bauble in his teeth whilst the other tried to eat one of my fluffy white stars.
Starbert regards it all with mild disdain
Tuesday, 19 December 2006
Ah, Fog!
At last an opportunity for what seems like dozens of car drivers to turn off their fog lights for a change.
Monday, 18 December 2006
Official Declaration
I hate the word succulent.
You just can't say it without sounding like a pretentious twerp.
Fortunately, I'm not saying it: I'm only putting it into a blog.
Sunday, 17 December 2006
Poetry Time [No. 2]
More smashing poetryObsessive Compulsive Christmas Tree Decoration
You're all green and pointy
And taller than me,
Sounding more like a thing of bad dreams
Than a nice Christmas tree.
That said, it's surprising
I don't have nightmares
About baubles of the same colour
Hanging on you in pairs,
Because that drives me nuts
I really should say.
In fact, I'd prefer the monster dreams
Then I could run away.
Like in that one I had
With Godzilla where
He chased me down the local High Street
And I hid in the Chemist's.
Thursday, 14 December 2006
Spontaneous Combustion
I've been reminded of a safety message I once read on some cushions:
Carelessness causes fire
That's one hell of a sweeping statement, but I've decided that this is a useful thing to know if you ever need to start a fire.
Forget everything you were ever taught about rubbing two sticks together to produce a spark – what a waste of time and energy it now seems. Surely it would be just as effective to pretend that they're light sabres, wave them around erratically, and nearly take out somebody's eye.
Suddenly I'm also seeing Spontaneous Human Combustion in a whole new light. Is the answer simply that these people were all doing something silly at the time?
Perhaps they were leaning back dangerously on their chair, or recklessly falling asleep whilst balancing a glass of lemonade precariously on one knee. Or juggling poisonous snakes. Who can say?
It doesn't look like a good way to go, though. Perhaps I'll stop running with scissors.
Wednesday, 13 December 2006
Why Do We Even Have An Answerphone?
A lesson I have learnt is that it is significantly easier and less faffy to use the answerphone to screen calls than it is to just answer them willy-nilly. It isn't that I won't talk to people, it's just that it's nicer to know who they are first so that I can decide if I want to talk to them right now.
Yet the amount of people who get as far as the answerphone, hang up and then phone again half an hour later is alarming. They don't seem to understand that they will NEVER get to speak to anybody, and we will all be forced to live our lives in a perpetual annoying and frustrating state where nobody answers their calls and our phone never stops bloody ringing.
Add into that the fact that our answerphone seems to like recording the ol' hang-up noise as an answerphone message, and we also have to clear it regularly of unwanted 'BUUUUUURB' noises.
It's almost like a battle of wills now. It's a case of waiting to see which of us will buckle and give in first.
Personally, My money's on it being everybody else.
Tuesday, 12 December 2006
It's A Miracle We Made It Through The Stone Age
"I'd been out shopping one afternoon. I hadn't noticed, but whilst I was walking a bit of the thread at the bottom of my trousers had been gradually working itself loose. I was wearing open-toed stilettos, and eventually this piece of loose thread became so long that it managed to wrap itself around one of my exposed toes, nearly garotting me in the process. I fell heavily, narrowly missing the lorry that was passing in a neighbouring village, onto the rock-hard paving; bruising my coccyx in the process and scattering my newly-bought lunch – which was then immediately devoured by pigeons and passing hobos. I was left both malnourished and injured. As if this wasn't bad enough, I'd also managed to inadvertently launch my heavy shopping bags – shot put style – as I fell, straight into an oncoming crowd of school children, decapitating one of them and seriously maiming three others. The pitch of their distressed cries then caused the windows in all the nearby buildings to shatter, and great deadly shards of glass rained down on everyone, nearly taking out both my eyes. As we all scrambled for shelter, one particularly sharp glass shard managed to cut clean through the lead that was tethering an enormous rabid dog to a postbox. The animal got free and proceeded to run amok, eating an old lady and infecting everybody else with botulism and agoraphobia. At the same time as all this was going on, an undersea earthquake in the Pacific Ocean caused distressed yaks all over the world to stampede, and the combined pounding of their strong hooves managed to knock the entire Earth slightly off its axis. All the seasons then shifted back by one, causing my porch to flood, and ruining my prize turnips. I needed compensation…"
Monday, 11 December 2006
New Entry In Highway Code?
Is there some new addition to the Highway Code that I haven't been informed about, or have pedestrian crossings always had a range of up to 50 metres in either direction?
I say that, of course, because surely it can't really be that people are so lazy that they'd rather start an impromptu game of real-life Frogger in town centres than walk the few extra paces it would take to cross the road without testing everybody's brakes.
Unless it's some sort of evolutionary thing: perhaps car drivers are supposed to run down everybody who can't understand simple concepts of road safety until only those that can are left? Maybe this is how society moves forward and improves itself? I'm beginning to hope so.
To be honest, I wouldn't get so annoyed about it if half of them weren't dragging small children along with them and setting a horrible example.
Although… that would fit in nicely with my evolutionary theory. Hmmm…
I think I might go out for a drive.
Sunday, 10 December 2006
Saturday, 9 December 2006
A Trip To The County Town
Dear Santa,
For Christmas this year, I would like you to bring everybody in the world some spatial awareness and a sense of their surroundings. That way, when I next go shopping – whether for Christmas or just for a general shop – I won't almost walk into the back of someone who's stopped right in front of me for NO APPARENT REASON, nor trip over somebody else's ankles because they have suddenly careened drunkenly in front of me without the slightest bit of warning.
Failing that, could you please fit everybody with an onboard computer that wires directly into their brain and operates personal brake and indicator lights before any such manoeuvre is carried out? Onboard computers are all the rage these days, you know; even toothbrushes have them.
Lots of love,
The Zinc Stoat
Friday, 8 December 2006
Poetry Time [No. 1]
Poetry TimeThe Hall Carpet
You look like something
From a bad Avengers set,
So seventies in design.
You make my head hurt
And misshapen blobs of colour
Float before my eyes
If I stare at you too long;
But I have no need to do that,
So that's alright then.
What The Avengers would look like if I built them as snowmen
Thursday, 7 December 2006
I Don't Care…
… how clean it would get my teeth; I'm not sticking anything with an 'onboard computer' into my mouth.
Wednesday, 6 December 2006
The Spongebob Squarepants Advent Calendar Is Giving Me The Fear
It's the bit when the doors over his eyes have been opened and he has gaping quadrangular ocular cavities that scares me the most.
Tuesday, 5 December 2006
I Learnt Something
Apparently it's OK to go the wrong way up a one-way street provided that you do it in reverse.
I wish I had witnessed this useful tidbit sooner.
Ex-Cat
Monday, 4 December 2006
Eh…?
I told somebody at work today about my new canoe:
"When we were kids, we used to stick canoes on people's cars all the time."
I've got to admit, I would have bet against that.
Sunday, 3 December 2006
I'm Really Tired Today
I've decided that dongle is now officially one of my favourite words.
I'm quite sure that this and the fact that I am tired are mutually exclusive.
Saturday, 2 December 2006
The Day The Cat Died
Somebody’s put a canoe on my car.
It’s been a long time since anything strange like that has happened. Previously I’ve returned to a car to find it covered in pieces of steak (and carnivorous pigeons), we’ve had a car egged, and a yellow Montego has developed pink spots in the night. But this canoe is a new look.
I wouldn’t mind, but whoever did it has scratched the roof.
As I'm typing this, my hands feel all dry and wrinkly. I’ve just had to enter the Kitchen of Doom™ and face the Washing Up of Death™. It took bloomin' ages.
To be fair, though, it isn’t really much of a Kitchen of Doom™. It’s more of a Kitchen of Washing Up™.
And I suppose the washing up can’t really be described as being Of Death, either – it should perhaps be more Of Life, since that’s what seems to keep springing up from it.
Also in today's news, one of the cats has died. Technically it was one of my parents’ cats, since I left home seven years ago, but he used to be my cat. I’ve had four cats in my life, and this is the third to die. That’s 75% dead cats.
I was hoping to make myself feel a little better with a tasteless (and quite poor) joke when the other half got home. The conversation was supposed to go like this:
It did not go to plan.Me: My mum phoned this morning. It’s about the cat.
Other half: Why? Is he worse? (I’d already found out that he was sick two days ago.)
Me: It’s worse than that, Jim. (Rubbish Star Trek reference.)
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