Birthday Time!
Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday, dear dralimaaaaaaaaaan,
Happy birthday to me.
Yes, it’s that time of the year again. Time to take stock, ponder the last year and really think about the things that really matter. Or whatever.
Or is that what you’re supposed to do on New Year? I forget. Old age. More aches and pains. Becoming slightly forgetful. The other day I went to pay for petrol and the card’s PIN number went straight out of my head. I had to use my debit card instead. Aargh! Paying for petrol straight from my bank account? Everyone knows Visa fronts me my petrol money.
Yesterday I was “a certain age”. Less than 24 hours later I’m “a certain age plus one”. A whole year in a day. Hardly seems fair. Hey ho.
I got some lovely presents and spent a wonderful yesterday evening over with my friends where we had Chinese takeaway and watched Eddie Izzard – very funny! Now I’ve got a couple of days off work in celebration.
And I had some good news – I won the lottery in time for my birthday! Well, maybe “won” is too strong a word. Here’s the notification:
Woo-hoo! I’m rich I tell you, rich!
Yes, 25 big ones. Unless “big ones” is slang for “thousands”, in which case, 25 small ones. What shall I spend it on? More tickets I expect. It’ll pay for next month’s entries. But nice all the same – that’s 2.5 times more than I’ve ever won in one go before!
So I leave you with these immortal words from Pink Floyd’s “Time”, from their amazing album “Dark Side of the Moon”. Forgive me if I get the words slightly wrong, but I can’t be bothered to spend 10 seconds looking them up so I’m reproducing them from memory.
“And you run, you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking,
Racing around, to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older,
Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death.”
Ah, happy days!
English – UK or US?
I read a great article a couple of days ago on the BBC News website – “Britishisms and the Britishisation of American English“. For many years “Americanisms” have been sneaking into the British language, but it appears that, to a lesser extent, the reverse is also true!
Popular culture seems to be the main reason for much of this exchange of language. Many of the biggest films and TV programmes hail from the US and so, of course, the British are usually able to understand US English as we’re constantly exposed to it. For example, most British people understand words such as “hood” (bonnet), “trunk” (boot), “gas” (petrol), “sidewalk” (pavement) and “shopping mall” (shopping centre).
There are also spelling differences to consider. I think the general rules for converting from UK English to US English are:
- If there’s an “s” pronounced like a “z”, replace the “s” with “z”
- If there’s an “ou”, remove the “u”
- If a word ends “re”, change it to “er”
These spelling differences can be tricky – as a computer programmer I’m getting very used to typing the word “colour” as “color” (otherwise it won’t work!). A colleague at work said something funny about the “ou” situation – “Right, we’ve gotten rid of the damn British, now let’s get rid of all those damn u’s!”.
Using slang is where we have to be careful. Because the languages are so similar, it’s easy to forget that what we say may be misunderstood. Back when I worked in Germany, there was an American woman working in the lab. One day she said to me “Hi, nice pants!”. I immediately panicked – was there a split in the fabric? Was my zip undone? It took me a while to realise that she was talking about my trousers!
The same colleague who had the “ou” theory also mentioned another slang word which could lead to misunderstandings. Is it safe to enter a corner shop in America and ask for “twenty fags, please”? Or to call out “I’ll be there in a minute, I’m just having a fag”? Possibly this particular slang word has two distinct meanings in both languages. If not, it would sound very odd. A “fag” in Britain being a cigarette, of course.
So, embrace both languages but think before you speak!
The Classics
I’ve always wanted to be a sophisticated chap. Reading the classics – Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Shakespeare, Tolstoy. Listening to all the classic music – Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky. I’d love to be able to intersperse my witty and sophisticated conversion with quotes from Sartre and, well, all those other dudes people quote.
The thing is, I can’t be bothered. I’ve tried. I’ve really tried.
I like the occasional classical music, but by and large it makes me feel like I’m in a lift, desperate to get out at any floor and take the stairs instead. Or in one of those posh restaurants where such music is constantly piped in.
A beautifully-presented plate of almost no food.
(Not that I regularly/ever visit such restaurants – they’re largely incompatible with my bank balance. My credit card prefers the likes of pub grub, McDonald’s and Pizza Express. Plus I don’t fancy paying a week’s wages for beautifully-presented almost nothing food.)
I had a go at some classical literature – Emily Bronte’s only published novel Wuthering Heights. I made it about half way through before I got bored. It’s a good story, but it was hard going, I tell you. And very little in the way of zombies, decapitations, magic or mystical creatures. I’ll stick to Kate Bush’s version from now on.
As for quotes, I have a vast array at my disposal. Unfortunately 99% come from Red Dwarf and Black Adder. It’s amazing how often I get to use them in real life situations!
My lack of knowledge (and interest in) the classics bothered me for ages. However, I’ve recently decided that I don’t care! Life’s too short. I’ll spend the rest of mine reading, watching and listening to the stuff I enjoy, rather than the stuff I think I ought to enjoy. And let’s face it, in a couple of hundred years, the stuff I like now will probably be “classics”!
So bring on Marina and the Diamonds, the Kim Harrison “Hollows” books and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That’s what I like and I’m not going to feel bad about it any more.
Things I’d like to know
There are many things I’d like to know.
Is there life out there in the big wide universe? Where did the energy come from to create the Big Bang? What ever happened to Cuddly Bear, my constant childhood companion?
Here are some more – maybe someone out there in Interweb Land can help me.
- Why is it that, no matter the size of the bag you’re carrying and how much is in it, the thing you want is the last thing you drag out of it? A small and potentially embarrassing pile of personal items forms as you delve into the entrance of what appears to be a gateway to another, infinitely large dimension, in which somewhere is the item you seek.
- At what stage in the process to produce instant coffee do they remove all the flavour, and how do they achieve this? And more to the point, why? You pay a huge amount of money and all you get is hot brown water.
- What’s the point of Thursdays? Thursday is a nothing day. Let’s break it down.
- Monday: the weekend is over, we’re recharged, let’s get some work done!
- Tuesday: doesn’t have a lot going for it, but at least it’s not Monday. The week has properly started.
- Wednesday: we’re halfway through the week!
- Thursday: we’re pretty worn out now. The weekend seems miles away. Tomorrow is still not the weekend, nor is it nearly the weekend. The promise of “halfway through the week” Wednesday seems so long ago.
- Friday: it’s the weekend tomorrow! One last push and we’re there!
- Saturday: party time!
- Sunday: and… relax.
Nope, Thursdays are no good to anyone, neither man nor beast.
- Why do I get really tired when I shouldn’t (at work, driving) but when I get home and try to sleep, I lie there for hours and nothing happens.
- How do they get away with these lying deodorant adverts where the bloke sprays it on and women come running for miles to throw themselves at him? I’ve been using the same brand for years. Nothing.
- What’s with these cosmetics adverts with all the mad science? Is the brand new anti-aging cream really so good because it contains the breakthrough “nourishplumpigeninoxTM” formula, or did someone make that up?
There’s no prize on offer, but if anyone can help me with these questions, you will have earned my heart-felt thanks. More precious than gold.
Club 130
This has been quite a couple of months, money-wise. And weirdly, all my “extras” have come to around the same amount (£130) – hence “Club 130”. What are the odds of that? (Well, one in one, though calculating the odds of something after it’s happened could be counted as “cheating”.) I’ve even created a logo using my mad design skills. Though I suspect that “brokus” isn’t actually Latin for “broke”.
The new, professionally created, Club 130 logo.
First off I loaned, yes, you guessed it, £130 to a friend.
Then, out of the blue, my car tax reminder arrived. Technically speaking, it wasn’t really out of the blue. It’s been due at the end of June for years. There’s a disk in my windscreen with a big “6” for June on it. So I guess I should really have known ahead of time, but time seems to be fairly zipping along at the moment and it just crept up on me. How much for the year, I hear you ask? £130 (ish).
Now, the third member of Club 130 really was a surprise.
Thinking that the beginning of July would be OK weather-wise, I booked the first two weeks for my annual leave. I wasn’t planning on going away, but there are plenty of places in Cornwall to visit for day trips – everything from beaches to cliff walks to moorland.
Then the Jet Stream got lost. This particular Jet Stream is supposed to bring warm, dry weather to the UK. Instead, it wasn’t where it was supposed to be and it rained. And rained. And rained.
Every day.
I think I left the house maybe 4 times during my holiday, and all were necessary trips (shopping and so on). Ultimately, I didn’t use my car from the second Tuesday until the following Monday when I went to work. After work I went shopping and parked on a hill, and returning to the car I saw the street lights glinting off something in the rear foot well. The last thing I expected it to be was a puddle!
So, look on the bright side. Surely everybody wants a swimming pool in their car? How cool is that! Well, it turns out that it makes the car smell damp and I’m sure water sloshing around didn’t do my fuel economy any favours. So off to the garage I went. They were great – ferried me to and from work two days in a row, fixed the door seal, dried out the car and helpfully pointed out that the air-con was no longer working.
Apparently if you don’t use the air-con for a few minutes every couple of weeks, the seals dry out and all the gas escapes! Who knew? Maybe if I’d read the owner’s manual when I bought the car. But I’m a bloke – I don’t read instructions.
I told them to fix the air-con as well, so they did that and chopped some money off the total, which spookily brought the total back to… £130!
So now I’m hoping that I don’t get any more eligible bills for Club 130 (not until my next pay cheque anyway), and I’m counting myself lucky that I’m not writing about “Club 250”, because that would have been no good all, money-wise.
So if anyone wants to join the club, just send me a receipt for around £130 and in return you’ll receive a laminated membership card* and exclusive secret decoder ring**.
*Membership cards not available
**No secret decoder ring will actually be sent
Taste tests, calories and statistics
Taste tests – seen regularly on TV adverts, “randomly” selected “members of the public” choose between two or three unmarked brands and decide which they prefer.
I imagine that the various manufacturers perform their taste tests and if they find that their brand is not the preferred one, they keep it quiet. Otherwise they hire some actors and make an advert. Which is fine.
However, from my own personal experience in switching brands, I’m not at all sure we can actually infer any usual information about which brand is best from a taste test. I see things falling into three main categories:
- Brand A really does taste better than Brand B (a statistically significant sample is required!)
- The taste tester has been buying Brand A for years and it tastes “normal” – and Brand B just tastes a bit “off” – these people don’t like change in their food
- The taste tester has been buying Brand A for years and is ready for a change and so chooses Brand B
I recently changed my brand of “spreadable butter” – those are the ones which taste butter-like but aren’t really butter. I bought a new brand but had some of the old left, so I tried them both side by side and decided the new one tasted more butter-like. To my taste buds, that constituted a proper, successful taste test.
By the way – spreadable butter? Butter and margarine both have pluses and minuses – butter is natural but high in fat, margarine is lower in fat but full of chemicals (to make it spreadable). Is spreadable butter not the worst of both worlds?
But I digress.
Here’s a personal example of case (2) above. I used to drink regular cola. I didn’t like the taste of diet. Then I looked at the calories in regular cola and how much I drank a day, and discovered I was absorbing several hundred calories just through what I was drinking. People tend to discount drinks as being “mainly water” but try adding all the calories up and you might be surprised. So I switched to diet. Ugh! After a couple of weeks it tasted fine and now I hate regular drinks instead – far too sweet!
If I’d taste-tested regular versus diet a few years ago I would have preferred regular, now I would prefer diet – because I’ve become used to diet, not because it actually tastes any better.
It’s all very well getting a statistically significant sample for a taste test, but if more people already use Brand A, will they tend to prefer Brand A because they’re used to it?
And that’s statistics in a nutshell. Useful at face value, but think about what they’re not telling you and take them with a pinch of salt. Now, is that a pinch of Brand A – table salt, Brand B – rock salt, or Brand C – low-salt salt…?
Take me to your leader
An alien, like the ones who could be visiting our resource-rich planet in the near future – or have they been here ALREADY?
“Independence Day”, “War of the Worlds”, “Battle: Los Angeles” – Hollywood is chock full of alien invasion stories and it’s safe to say that generally, it doesn’t go well for the human race.
I was reading a post on the origin of UFOs on The Matrix Times blog recently, and that got me thinking – what would happen if a bunch of extra-terrestrials actually landed here?
First of all, I’m hoping that they’ll be friendly. Okay, our planet has vast amounts of (moderately polluted) water – a resource which is undoubtedly scarce on the aliens’ home world (according to many Sci-Fi stories). They may wish to take this by force! But more than likely anyone with the technical skills to reach another planet will be willing to at least talk before crushing us like bugs.
My hypothetical aliens might bring a variety of special skills with them – technical know-how, telepathy, may even the ability to alter the very nature of matter, effortlessly changing one substance into another (like turning lead into gold, for example)!
Don’t even get me started on the popular alchemical pursuit of attempting to change a common metal into a rarer metal, thus making the rarer lovely shiny metal so common that the world’s economy collapses (again).
We humans have our own special skill – fearing and hating anything different. So, what would happen when these happy friendly aliens land, eager to be our friends and share their enlightened views of the universe? I’m assuming at this point that the aliens
- Contact us first and over a number of years build up a relationship with us so that our fear is somewhat decreased prior to face-to-face contact, or
- Have the necessary technology to protect them against the best missiles money can buy during their approach and entry into our atmosphere
Here’s my breakdown on what I think will happen.
- 10% of the population won’t notice
- 10% of the population will believe it to be a government conspiracy
- 50% of the population will panic
- 5% of the population won’t care
- 5% of the population will embrace the newcomers, eager for cultural exchange
- 10% of the population will attempt to exploit the aliens for personal gain
- 10% of the population will immediately form the “Children of the Sky” cult, worshipping them as gods
Okay, so maybe I’m being a bit down on the human race, but somehow those numbers look about right to me. Probably more than 50% of the population will panic but they fall into the other groups too.
And the funniest thing of all? After all this panic and cult-forming has taken place, it turns out that our new alien friends are actually just a group of student aliens from the Sirius Major College of Fine Arts, backpacking around the galaxy during their summer holidays.
Ah, Shopping
The joys of food shopping. It has to be done. Otherwise, I’ll starve to death.
Okay, I could do my shopping online and get it delivered, but I really don’t fancy that at all. I want to choose my own bananas. I’m very particular about my bananas. I need them in various states of ripeness so I get a nice-to-eat banana every day for my lunch at work.
If a product is out of stock, I want to make the decision whether or not to “substitute it for a similar product”.
I don’t want to hang around at home as it gets later and later wondering if my food is going to arrive, getting more and more stressed (it doesn’t take much to get me stressed).
This all means that I need to go shopping.
With a few exceptions, I choose the shop and the timing with care. I choose half past nine in the evening – the roads are quiet and the shop is quiet.
I choose a supermarket which is neither too small (little choice) or too big (can’t find anything).
These choices reduce my stress level. Average time for my weekly shop – less than 15 minutes in and out.
So what does annoy me the most about shopping?
- The “What, pay?” crowd – these are the people who pack all their shopping away and then look surprised when the cashier says “That’ll be 21 pounds 30, please.” After rooting around for what seems a lifetime they finally find a card and shove it in the slot. This is a financial transaction, people. Please be prepared to pay.
- The “pay by cash” crowd – not the people who pay using actual money, but the people who extract all manner of small change from their wallet/purse/pockets, count it and start piling it up neatly on the counter. The cashier then has to count it again. To be honest, I feel a little guilty hating this, they’re just being careful/sensible, but Boy! it takes a while!
- Products which magically move shelves overnight – I hear this is done to (a) make people look around so they see other products to spend their hard-earned on, and (b) deter shoplifters who tend to know exactly where the product is they wish to steal and don’t want to spend time searching in case security get suspicious. I understand the reasons, but I need to be in and out in 15 minutes! I don’t have time to spend on a hunt for my favourite snacks.
- The “conveyor gap” crowd – these individuals start stacking their shopping at the far end of the conveyor belt, leaving a huge gap in the middle so that people behind them can’t start to unpack. Are they afraid their shopping’s going to get mixed up with he person’s in front? That’s what those plastic separators are for.
- The “roughly 10 items or less” crowd – when I’m in the “10 items or less” queue, it means I just popped in for a couple of things and I could even be in a hurry! I can’t help counting the items in the baskets of people ahead of me. And man, do I get (quietly and internally) mad when I spot more than 10. Bastards.
Ah, shopping.
Oh deer
“Oh deer” – no, not an embarrassing typo. We’re talking Bambi’s here (I understand that “Bambi” is a name and has no plural, and neither “Bambis” nor “Bambies” look right, so I hope you’ll excuse the use of the apostrophe in the plural).
From personal observation there has been a recent spate of attempted animal suicides in my area. Over the last couple of months every kind of furry mammal has flung itself at my car in an apparent attempt to end it all.
A Bambi, much like the suicide Bambi recently spotted on a main road in Cornwall.
Here’s a list of the most recent attempts:
2 cats (Truro and Redruth)
1 fox (A30 dual carriageway)
1 squirrel (Falmouth)
1 deer (A30 dual carriageway)
1 drunken youth (Truro)
All of these incidents took place after 10pm except for the squirrel – he only required a quick braking manoeuvre. The others elicited a last minute swerve.
Now, the fox and the squirrel I can understand – they’ve never traditionally balked at running into the road.
I always thought cats had more sense.
I’ve included “drunken youth” in the list because he was behaving like an animal. He jumped out into he road and stuck his finger up at me. Maybe he was trying to thumb a lift but mistakenly used “the finger” instead. As I passed him I saw him in the rear view mirror move further out into the road, finger still held high as I drove away. I was quite annoyed at such a random incident and briefly considered slamming the car into reverse and backing over him. Of course that would have been “wrong”, although, to be honest, prison food could only improve my diet.
That brings me to the Bambi. A deer in Cornwall? What? I saw it in the headlights at the last second as it calmly made its way down the verge and straight out into the slow lane. I performed a rather impressive 70mph swerve and saw it in the rear view mirror stare at me for a second before, again very calmly, it made its way back up the verge.
My Dad later told me that apparently there’s a “deer farm” in the vicinity (deer don’t generally roam free in Cornwall which is why I was so surprised to see one at all, let alone on the main road).
I’m not sure why one would “farm deer”, but I guess it must have been “deer harvest” time and one of them made a break for freedom.
Apparently hitting a deer at 70mph does serious damage to a car (and it probably doesn’t do the deer much good either) so it’s lucky I had an empty lane to swerve into.
Are these incidents all part of the rich tapestry of nature, or is there a multi-species suicide pact going on? Hopefully the former, otherwise it’s all just a bit depressing.
The Great Green Missile
Today my attention was brought to a story in the news about a Brazilian chappie who decided he wanted to spend the day looking like the Incredible Hulk.
Mr Paint Job.
Having decided on this course of action he covered himself in green paint. Did he use specialist body paint? No. He used specialist submarine and missile paint.
Apparently it took all his friends an entire day to scrape it off.
Now, while this is a vaguely amusing story, it brings to mind an obvious question.
“Specialist missile paint”?
Specialist submarine paint, well, maybe. After all, it gives all the little fishes something nice to look at. But why develop special paint for missiles? Is it considered bad form to blow people up with missiles with the paint peeling off? Do the intended victims care? Do they casually remark “Oh, will you look at that, they obviously used ordinary exterior wall paint on that missile, it’s all peeling off” in the micro second before their violent incineration? Is it a point of national pride to only use the most beautifully painted high explosives? Or is it so they look good when certain countries drive them through the streets during parades?
Hello people. They’re ugly inventions that do an ugly job. There ain’t no amount of paint gonna cover that up.
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