Tuesday, April 15, 2008
I realise now why I don't complain very much. It's not because I'm English, it's just because I find it so fucking mind-numbingly depressing having to explain why I'm pissed off about something that ought to be:a) obvious
b) unacceptable
c) just serves to remind me that the vast majority of people working in the world are content to exist in a state of perpetual and total fucking mediocrity.
This has all been brought on by a barrage of incompetence over the last week. Offenders include:
Fabrix cases (6/10) - forgot to send my iPhone case. I had to send some furiously shitty e-mails before I got a response, but at least they DID respond and gave me $10 off my next purchase so even though I have to wait a MONTH to get my case, then at least they could be arsed to say sorry, bless 'em. This counts as a "success". I despair.
The Tooting Tram & Social (4/10) - it's the one nice bar in deep Sarf, Sarf London, but their cash machines were off so I had to keep running to the bank and it was so rammed I had to wait an HOUR. Yes. A Fucking Hour. To get to the bar. I tell you if it hadn't been my mate's birthday I would have been out of there like a fucking shot. Cunts.
Argos (4/10) - Amazing, brazen, lying fucks. Truly. When you say something is in stock on your website and I fucking pay for it, maybe you ought to say "No it's not in stock" if it's not in stock. Telling me it's in stock so I pay for it and then it not being in stock is what we call "a lie" and it tends to get your customers really fucking pissed off with you.
Nintendo (1/10) - why do these silly cunts never make enough product? Would I open a shop and fail to stock it with any shit to buy, then be amazed when people get irritated? No. Please commit Sepukku immediately you useless bastards. And fire your operations director, he's clearly spent the profits on crack. He certainly hasn't been doing any operational planning has he, you fucking dicks.
I get no pleasure from this. In fact, it crushes my very soul.
Please can everyone just take a deep breath and stop fucking things up. Otherwise I'm going to just go completely anarchist and start sending CEO's bags of human shit and pouring petrol through letter boxes and stuff. This is generally considered unacceptable by society so I'm trying not to, you know?
But if you make me, then by god. You're going to get a human poo sandwich and it's all your fault.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Un-fucking-believable
I was on my scooter on Tuesday evening, approaching a set of red traffic lights. A column of traffic stood waiting in the right-turn lane, and the straight-ahead/left-turn lane was empty, so I started to slow down and directed my trusty steed straight up the middle of that lane. Suddenly a car pulled out immediately in front of me, coming out from the right lane into the left, and bearing extremely close to me, so I braked, but the wet road made me start to skid on the wet road, towards the car. Everything went into “slo-mo”, like it always does in moments of high hecticity - or maybe, rather, my brain and reactions go into hyper-drive - so I jumped off the scooter and managed to land in a crouch, but still on my feet, while the bike dropped and landed on its side, inches from the car.I stood full up and turned to start picking up the bike; the car had stopped, the window was wound down, and a teenager was gawping at me out of the passenger window, while the driver was leaning past him towards me and saying something. I thought that maybe it was “are you fine?”, but I couldn’t quite hear, so I raised the visor on my helmet and said “what?” She repeated, enunciating very clearly: “Are you blind? I was turning left!”
Un-fucking-believable cunt. It’s probably moot whether it was in any way my fault, as she did indicate, though I think only at the moment of turning — and the fact that she was pulling out of lane suggests to me that she should have waited for me to go past as I was going straight in lane. Thing is, regardless of whose fault it was, the fucking cunt had basically just run me off the road, and rather than check whether I was OK, like any normal human being would, she asked if I was blind, because I hadn’t known in advance that she wouldn’t look properly before pulling out in front of me! Fucking cunt.
I was so gobsmacked by her fucking brute idiocy that I just said “are you blind! You nearly knocked me over! Just get out of the way”, waved her along with as much contempt as I could muster (at that moment, contempt factor 37), gave her an extremely evil stare and drove off. Seconds later I had a momentary primal fantasy involving turning round, catching up with her and delivering a solid and well-deserved strike through the open window — but obviously civilisation got the better of me, I thought better of such behaviour, and carried on driving away.
But honestly, what a fucking cunt. Cunt.
Monday, December 3, 2007
Shiraz, the magic grape
I was only talking to the Lobster the other day about a bottle of wine I'd been subjected to at the weekend by my fiance. On paper, it sounds atrocious; Leopard's Leap South African Pinotage / Shiraz.Let me stop you there, I thought. To paraphrase Dr Johnson; a South African wine should be "opened with care, carefully decanted over a flame, allowed to breathe in a decanter and then poured down the nearest drain, as fit for nothing". Pinotage, being an SA only variety, tends to have a reasonably bad name. And by that I mean whenever I drink it, it's shit.
But lo and behold, this was not only drinkable - it was good. I'd recommend it. Nay, in a fit of charmed wine insanity, I went back and bought a half case of the stuff!
The Lobster took it all in his stride. "That's because it's got Shiraz in it", he indicated by shifting his antennae. "It's a magic grape."
Now generally, I'd always associated a Shiraz with overly-peppery "big reds" but it seems the Lobster is right. Cue this weekend and another Shiraz sensation - this time d'Arenberg 'The Dead Arm' Shiraz 2005. More new world wine I figured I could take or leave - this time made from (and get this) dying vines that have been deliberately infected with a fungal virus so that parts of the vine die, leaving small yields of intense (hopefully non-diseased) fruit.
The verdict: Outstanding. Rich, intense mouthfuls of berries and great smooth finish, overtones of chocolate, dates and a sharp woody nose.
So, to recap, Shiraz can:
- make Pinotage taste attractive
- make diseased fungally infected vines taste so good you want to cry
- look under the hood and teach you tai-chi
This year I'm voting Shiraz for president. It's even the name of a town in Iran so it's, like, politically correct and everything.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
I'll give you “obesity epidemic”, you shits
Picture the scene: a Saturday morning, a few short hours’ kip after the last of the preceding Friday night’s revelries. A bleary taxi ride with some … interesting corners, and the National Express coach station hoves into view.(Yes, we’re getting on a coach. A fucking coach. “No, Sir, there aren’t any trains to or from that destination on that route for the whole of the weekend, as there are planned engineering works. [Check me out, planned. Yes. As in ‘irrevocable law of nature’.] No, Sir, none on that route; there are trains going there, but you’ll have to change at fucking Lahore, and you’ll have to go on the stopping service via a shanty town outside Marrakech and the arse-end of Tbilisi. No, Sir, there are no discounts available, suggesting, I imagine, that they’re trying to discourage people from travelling that weekend.” No shit.)
So, a glance, askance, at the facilities. Some fuel is obviously necessary if I’m to get through the next couple of hours, surrounded by entirely uncontrolled screaming toddlers and shit-awful mobile ’phone ring-tones, without suffering severe internal stress; but what shall I find? Something healthy and rejuvenating, perhaps, a restorative gustatory tonic to assist with recovery, to couch against the upcoming onslaught of motorway madness? Some sushi, just some salad, hell, a <splutter> Pret prawn sandwich? Yep, sure. In a dog’s cock.
“OK, I’ll have <wince> an XL Bacon Double Cheeseburger. Yes, fizzy orange, please, the sugar’ll perk me up, I s’pose. No, no chips thanks, I … You what?”
“It’s cheaper with the chips, Sir. £5.43 without the chips, £5.29 with.”
Cheaper with the chips. Cheaper with the chips. It actually costs less money to have a pile of chips than not to have them.
And you, our burghers and leaders, town–, city– and nation–wide, have the staggering audacity to wonder why the place is filling up with bloated, malnourished, yet horrendously overweight shits with pasty faces, ADD, bad skin, bad hair and bad attitudes, forcing their pre-packaged pre-rendered excuses for musical taste into our ever-assailed ears, wherever we go, through whatever latest transistorised diversity-munging gadgets they've queued up to be “subsidised” with by pan-globally profligate product pimps whose sole intention is to keep them feeling sufficiently satisfied with their lots and remaining sufficiently disengaged by your offices from any real involvement with the mechanics of this fragile equilibrium of acquistiveness that they'll continue happily to play their crucial parts in maintaining this seemingly neverending cycle of shite?
I’ll tell you why it’s happening, you cunts - it’s because you cunts allow these untrammelled shitmongers to peddle such piss-poor wares as this “food”, this putrid, nutritionless, poisonous puke, these sweaty little packages of ultimately unsatisfying and ultimately unsatisfactory yet utterly immediate gratification, all over the communities you profess to protect, shamelessly lining them up for the next fix, while shoving laughably meagre percentages of their ill-gotten gains up your greasy arseholes in planning backhanders so that you evil scum can gobble up more of the ever-proliferating, pernicious, rancid turd these conglomerate charlatans stuff down your throats in the vague, dimly-conceived hope that it might raise your vile, egotistical excuses for existences above the level of material achievement that you’ve managed to keep those you ostensibly represent down to. That’s why it’s happening.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
I have no mouth, but I must scream
I hate the fat blithering incompetent complacency of our public transport system. I have often fantasised about stripping naked, daubing myself in the blood of a senior rail boss and launching myself across London bridge while defecating in order to register (through the medium of contemporary dance) my displeasure.I also detest the new media hand job generator that is Twitter.com. I'm sure your Twitter feed is a work of genius, but every one I've seen so far is a pile of steaming camel shit that only serves to act as a sickening magnifying glass held high to examine the fine detail of that over stuffed bucket of petty banalities Twitter-ers call a life.
Yet, as a tracking tool to isolate white middleclass digi-marketing nerds so that they can be lined up, stripped, hog-tied and used as fuel in my new idiot-powered reactor core come the revolution, I commend it.
The point I am getting to, is that TFL and Twitter deserve each other. It also gives me a place to log all the terrible shit that TFL get up to so I can send them a digest of their own failure, monthly, by post, in triplicate.
Here it is. Cunts.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
What lives in a humidor?
A brief post. At the moment, I have within my cedar lined and richly buffed perfection of a body, the following items:Macanudo No. 4 (x5) Macanudo No. 4
These were purchased entirely on a punt, but I have to say as an early-day cigar or for more casual appreciation, it's a solid and unpretentious experience. An easy draw, the first flavours are of butterscotch and spice, mellowing in to a steady smoke. It's noticeable for it's origin - a Dominican Cigar rather than Cuban. I'd certainly recommend, especially to the first time purchaser. Reliable, enjoyable, one to share.
Fonseca No. 1 Lonsdale (x15) Fonseca No. 1 Lonsdale
I'd read a number of reviews for these and was duly impressed, but I have to say it's a serious and considered commitment. This isn't a cigar to be taken lightly. Complex, passionate and with a strong flavour on the first burn, it's not something the first time smoker is likely to enjoy. After dinner with a good drink I've certainly enjoyed it but the Lonsdale size, alas, is not for me. Being an infrequent smoker these days, my lungs can't take a good hour to two hours of smoking! Overall, worth trying. But one to try first.
Cohiba Mini Cohiba Mini
One strictly for the ladies, the Cohiba Mini seems to carry enough flavour of the Cohiba to actually be genuinely worthy when looking for a light or faster smoke. The puritans won't go for this at all. A guilty pleasure then for me, very enjoyable with a social after dinner coffee.
Soon I feel, I shall be back to my long time staple, the Trinidad Coloniales. An excellent and well seasoned veteran cigar. Feel free to investigate this staple smoke, here.
Hospital canteen food
Since the weekend, I’ve spent the majority of my waking hours engaged in visiting a relative of mine currently conducting a sojourn at an NHS “trust” hospital. I’ve discovered, I feel obliged to announce, that the food in the canteen is nothing short of incomparable. As I’d thus far been surviving on decaf. coffee and slabs of Cadbury’s Bournville obtained from the League of Friends café near the ward concerned, your apprehension of the palpability of my delight on discovering the canteen early on Sunday evening will no doubt constitute a far from Herculean task. “Ah yes,” I thought, “some excellent scran shall surely ensue”. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay.Upon close scrutiny, the menu revealed itself as a veritable cornucopœia of culinary conjuration. Though naturally my vexation at the prospect of narrowing such an array of gustatory marvels to a single selection was sore indeed, I cast aside trepidation and elected to consume a combination of roasted pork and potatoes, boiled carrots, peas and gravy. I have every confidence, dear Reader, that you'll formulate with little encouragement some realistic notion of the moistness of the carrots, the tenderness of the meat and the expertise with which said flesh had been filleted; not to mention how delicate the “pop” of the peas as they surrendered their savoury secrets, and under how gentle a pressure of the mere tips of my teeth.
For lunch the next day I chose a Beef Stroganoff soi-disant, accompanied by wild rice and salad. I’ll warrant that you’ll construct a similarly effortless comprehension of how creamy an affair was the sauce, and how appropriate the hint of spice; of how perfectly al dente was the rice, how spruce and crisp the salad.
Clearly, the inevitable conclusion from this tale must be that hospital food has evidently advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years? That to suggest, par exemple, “ill-governed” as a more fitting descriptor for the rice than “wild” would be somehow uncharitable?
IN A FUCKING DECOMPOSING LOBSTER’S STINKY GREEN PUTRID ARSEHOLE.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
I am the humidor
I was driving (or indeed, being driven) back from a hard day's wedding related shopping boredom today when our progress was impeded by a motorist "driving" (and I use the word lightly) at around 10 miles an hour down Wandsworth High Street while swerving wildly across the road. What was most noticeable as we decelerated from a steady 40 miles an hour to this aggravatingly low speed, was the large Christian fish symbol (itself a perversion of the greek alpha) stuck precariously to the boot door.As I've been feeling a bit stressed and irritable this weekend anyway, I couldn't help but start ranting wildly about how every time I see a car doing something terrifying on the roads near where I live (normally a shit hatchback with the bumper held on with gaffer tape and one wing painted a mysterious beige colour, irrespective of what colour the rest of the car is), it always seems to have a fucking fish symbol on the back. And while we're at it, is this some kind of secret code for "Watch out; Dangerously shit driver ahead."
This is sort of tacky generalisation is terribly unhelpful really, but it did make me feel better and got me thinking about correlation vs. causality and the dangers therein. This is one of the most fundamental principles of scientific methodology and I think it's cool.
It's a thought so cool in fact that it has it's own groovy catchphrase called "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" which means in latin "because of this shit, this different shit does something".
I understand this as follows:
Humans are constantly trying to figure out the world around us and when we see two events that occur together, we tend to say that one causes the other (cause and effect) but 9 times out of 10 they don't. They just happened to occur at the same time and it's us who decided that they were linked because the world is so damn complicated and our senses are so limited that if we didn't link things up (albeit wrongly) then we'd spend our entire lives hiding under the bed with forty crates of baked beans and a spear .
Check this out; this is a genuine experiment that a couple of guys in California did about 10 years ago:
If you put a foreign body (like a piece of plastic) under your skin, then your body will start to form hard connective tissue (like scar tissue) around it to protect the other soft bits that are near the bit of plastic from getting hurt. Over time, if the bit of plastic rubs against this hard tissue and keeps killing cells, then the cells have to keep re-growing constantly. And if you've got an area of fast growing cells, then you can get cells that won't die naturally and will self replicate faster than the body can destroy them.
So the researchers stuck foreign bodies (chopped up pieces of a credit card) under the skin of a mouse. Over time this led to the mouse getting immortal cells around the plastic lumps for the reasons above and the researchers published a paper with the following title:
"Credit cards give you cancer"
Now obviously this is a hideous abuse of a living creature and they got fired and fined and other stuff, but their point was (ironically) about bad science and how people (like the Media) are constantly putting two and two together and getting four hundred and seventy two thousand, six hundred and eighty.
Brilliantly, it is this exact error in logic that I wanted to apply to my thought processes about the Christian cack-wagon and its driver, in order to figure out whether I was justified in calling them a savage tool, or if it was I who was the savage tool and I should track them down to give them a personal apology and a small kiss.
In this case, my hypothesis is not "Credit cards give you cancer", it's "People with fish symbols on their cars are dangerous fucktards who should be avoided on the roads like the black plague".
To be pathologically clear, let's mark my correlating events with "E" and my causal link with "C":
E1: People who drive badly are idiots.
E2: People who are very religious are idiots.
C: Idiocy as a factor correlates, therefore very religious people who drive will always be poor drivers and must be mocked doubly.
In order to determine whether E1 and E2 do genuinely correlate or not, I need to try to examine the basis of these statements:
E1 evidence:
This is easy. If you drive badly you are in danger of death or in danger of killing others. Society classes this as a bad thing. Idiots do bad things, therefore People who drive badly are idiots. Unless being and idiot and doing something bad aren't causal. Ah. Erm. No, I've got a way round this, really. Gimme a sec.
E2 evidence:
Harder. The fish symbol in question (the Icthys) denotes an affinity with the Christian faith. Therefore, I can assume with a reasonable level of confidence that if someone has the Icthys symbol on the back of their car then they are a Christian.
Moreover, I can assume with an equal level of confidence that this person is sufficiently passionate about their religion that they want to tell other people about it. SO passionate about it in fact, that they wish to mount the symbol of their faith on what amounts to a mobile billboard so that anyone forced to drive behind them at a mandated 10 miles an hour will be forced to gaze on the symbol and think "you wanker, get a fucking move on and stop thinking about the fucking gospels for 2 minutes before I drive you off the cunting road".
My personal experience with extremely religious people is thankfully limited to followers of the Christian right, a couple of whom I've crossed swords with messily over the years. However I've managed to correlate (oops, did it again) this behaviour against the behaviour of extremists in other faiths (such as Islam) who do things that I personally disagree with like dressing up in masks and chopping off other human beings' heads with a sword and sending a video of it to a television station.
This in turn has led me to the aforementioned prejudice that "People who are very religious are idiots".
Hang on though, it's just a prejudice. There's no actual proof is there that being religious makes you an idiot, there's merely correlating events. Which means I'd need to research those underlying events. Which would turn up more correlations. With more underlying events. With more correlations. With more underlying events. With....ah....sorry, my frontal cortex just imploded.
Fuck it. The world is too complex for my brain. I must be an idiot.
.
.
.
.
.
.
But does that make me really religious, or a bad driver?
Friday, October 19, 2007
Fuck me, this blog software might actually be bearable
I’ll tell you what, most of the damn stuff is total, unadulterated shit.WordPress? ShitPress.
Blogger? Shitter.
(I mean, I could go on.)
As for this particular bit, Serendipity? Well, it hasn’t pissed me off too badly so far. This is because it doesn’t look at first glance like it’s been designed or coded by a fucking gibbon with no hands and two arses. Maybe it’ll end up looking like that (’specially once I’ve had my fucking filthy claws all over it), but for now, let’s just say it hasn’t made me shed my horrible pukey filthy-green liver-slime yet.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
I am the Lobster
Eating loads of lobsters makes my shits properly healthy. Seriously, the sort of thing you'd imagine some mungbean-munching alfalfa addict to produce. Maybe I should go on an all-lobster diet.Actually, that’s quite a smart idea. Even setting aside the sheer, lustrous, crass opulence of the whole thing, it’d still be excellent. Imagine it:
Waiter: Would Sir like to see the menu?
Lobster: No thanks, I’d like some lobster please. I only eat lobster.
Waiter: I see. Excellent choice, Sir. How would Sir like the lobster prepared?
Lobster: Are you fucking shitting me?
Waiter: I’m sorry, Sir?
Lobster: Is your lobster fresh?
Waiter: I believe so, Sir.
Lobster: Well then I’ll have it boiled, won’t I?
Waiter: I expect so, Sir.
[Waiter skulks off to kitchen to piss into an old lobster carcass]
See? Fucking fantastic.
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