I'm not coming in today...

Now, this might be a totally unjustified rant, so please just let me know If I should just shut up.

My boss didn't come into work yesterday. The reason that he didn't come into work can be boiled down to a very simple reason: He didn't want to drive a Nissan Micra.

The story goes something like this: The Boss was driving along in his shiny, shiny Merc when he was rearended by a bus. Nothing too serious - in fact the only damage was cosmetic. So about a week later, a man from the garage was due to pick up his car to have bent bits straightened and broken bits mended. In exchange for his slighly mangled Merc, he was to receive a courtesy car for a couple of days.

The problem with this arrangement was that when the courtesy car arrived... it was a Nissan Micra.

"I'm not driving a Nissan Micra," said the Boss.

"I'm sorry sir, that's all we've got," said the Man From The Garage.

"Well I'm not driving it," said the Boss. "Take it away!"

And they did. Which left the Boss with no courtesy car with which to drive to work. So what all this boils down to is that my Boss is too much of a Mecedes snob to drive a little japanese car for day.The question I put to you, the jury, for your consideration is this: Was he right to skive on this basis?And also... would you drive a Nissan Micra?

Tea

Now, I'm not actually going to rant about tea in this post, despite the title. Tea gives me no problem at all. In fact i love tea. It's an unreasonable level of love (and possibly entirely inappropriate) given that I am a man and tea is a hot beverage, but the truth of it is that if I could have it's babies, I would.
So we've established that I like tea.
So anyway. I was watching the news the other morning and there was an article on it about tea. Apparently if you add milk to it, it loses some of it's health benefits. I'm not going to rant about that either, cos I don't care. What I am going to rant about is Peppermint Tea. And Camomile Tea. And Fragrant Dandelion and Grass Clippings Tea.
Let me explain to everyone how tea is made. You take a tea plant. You cut its leaves off and you pour hot water on them You now have tea. Doing the same with nettles does not make tea. It makes some sort of nettle drink. Tea is called tea because it's made from tea. That's it's defining quality. That's what makes it different from cola or orange squash.
So could all these people who ponce around the office with their Rasberry Tea and their Daffodil and Floor Sweepings Tea please refrain from calling it something it's not. Otherwise we may as well start calling all our other drinks 'tea;. I'm off to the pub for a few teas and maybe a coupla tea chasers. I'd like a glass of merlot tea with my dinner.
And why stop with drinks? If we're in the business of calling non-tea stuff tea, lets just call EVERYTHING 'tea'. Gotta make a tea call. I'm on the Tea. On my way to tea. Lovely tea we're having. The Tea in Iraq is a worry. Did you watch tea on the tea tonight? Gotta take a tea.
Ok, I'm finished now.

And I thought I had too much time on my hands...

It's just too much! My brain cannot comprehend the sweet awesomeness of it! I can only hope that when they'd finished with it, they didn't eat it... That's diabetes waiting to happen.

What's going on?

So this guy has just paid £18 for my old copy of Halo, when he could have got it for £8 on Amazon. Am I missing summat here?
Ho hum. I must plan what to spend my newfound riches on. Excuse me...

So Dr Karen had the extreme pleasure of meeting my ENTIRE extended family this afternoon. It all went well except for one rather embarrasing moment for poor Catters.

Picture the scene. All of my aunties and uncles, cousins, my parents, my little brother (the nice one!) my Gran and my Granddad all sitting a round in a big circle in the lounge. Dr Karen had a prime spot next to my Gran who was nattering away. Everybody is indulging in nibbles, drinks and good converstation.

Into this circle comes my mother's dog, who then proceeds to create a rather unfortunate situation for poor Dr Karen...

You may now guess which of these three options took place:

1...Dr Karen went to stand up, tripped over the dog and spilled an entire
cup of tea over my Gran!

2...my mother's dog cocked it's leg and let rip over Dr Karen's
shoes!

3...my mother's dog stuck his head in Dr Karen's bag and stole a
tampon, which he then proceeded to consume in front of the entire family!

And the answer is... NUMBER TWO! Yay.

Invasion of the One Armed Men (or Dr Richard Kimble's Worst Nightmare)

Yesterday afternoon, I was walking across Bristol to take advantage of a lift when, in the space of about quarter of a mile, I passed three, yes three, one armed men. Two of them were just missing an arm and the third had a strap-on one with a clippy bit on the end. He was holding a newspaper in it.

They were all missing their left arm. I wonder if there was a left arm amputees convention going on in Bristol yesterday...

Text Messaging Chin

There's this girl that's been bugging me. I pass her every afternoon on my way to the bus-stop, always in the same place. At first I thought that she had no chin, which is not attractive on a girl. Sorry, all you chinless girls out there. It's just not.

Anyway, I soon figured out that she did in fact have a chin and suffered from a terrible affliction known (by me, anyway) as text messaging chin. The symptoms of this terrible condition include the dissapearance of the chin into the neck as the sufferer looks down at her phone. Other synmptoms include bruises incurred when the sufferer walks into walls and people because she's unable to look where she's going whilst texting.

This is becoming a serious societal problem. It's not just the one girl, you see. There are hundreds of them wandering round Bristol and goodness knows how many up and dowen the country. We need to organise chin transplants for them. Or if that's too radical, maybe we should just take their damn phones away!

Dead Man's Chest

Shiver me timbers. Tis time to talk all piratey as the new Pirates of the Carribbean movie came out at the weekend! And grand it were, too.

Yarrr. Although tweren't quite as good as the first un, Dead Man's Chest was mightily entertainin'; Depp camped it up as you'd expect and Bill Nighy as Davy Jones was fantastic. Obviously Orlando Bloom played his part in the style of a wooden plank, however Keira Knightly, who I didn't particularly rate in the first one, was much, much better and really rather fanciable. Not that I conveyed this nugget of info to the the young lady I went to see it with. That would just be rude (see how I gave up talkin' like a pirate there?).

The only criticism of the movie that I could really make was that the crew of the Flying Dutchman were overly CGI-ed. While the effects were very good, I thought that part of the winning appeal of the first movie was that the special effects were only glimpsed now and again until the finale. This time, you had barnacled pirates and pirates with starfish on their faces and that one with the hammerhead shark head all the way through the movie. That said, Davy Jones looked simply magnificent!

Goat

Hmm.
Here's a rather dull article about a naughty goat:

Goat demoted for parade incident
LONDON, England (AP) -- A British army regiment's ceremonial pet goat was demoted in disgrace after it marched out of line before a host of international dignitaries during a parade to mark Queen's Elizabeth II's birthday, a military spokesman said Saturday.
The military mascot, a 6-year-old male goat called Billy, was downgraded from the rank of lance corporal to fusilier -- the same status as a private -- after army chiefs ruled his poor display had ruined the ceremony June 16 at a British army base in Episkopi, western Cyprus.
Lance Cpl. Dai Davies, 22, the goat's handler, was unable to keep control during the march earlier this month, as the mascot darted from side to side, throwing soldiers off their stride...

There's a load of somewhat uninspiring stuff about the naughty, naughty goat after that, but then it gets down to a few mildly interesting facts:

A total of 11 ceremonial pets -- including a ferret, an Indian black buck and a ram -- are kept by the British Army, but regiments do not take the mascots on tours to combat zones. British legislators were told last month that keeping the pets costs £30,000 ($55,000; €44,000) per year...
..."He is not a grazing goat and has food flown in from Wales. Billy also has an allowance of two cigarettes a day -- both of which he eats," said [a] spokeswoman...

It's a bloody goat. It will eat grass and bits of wood and spoons and pretty much anything else you stick in front of it. Why the hell do that have to be Welsh grass and bits of wood and spoons? And what's with the fags? I'm tempted to send him a copy of Allen Carr's book. Do you think the goat gets grumpy if he doesn't get his two ciggies a day?

Ants with Legs

I've always been one for odd little scientific snippets. Particularly stories about scientists who perform important research into importanat things which enrich our lives. Such as the following (edited) story from the BBC Website:

Ants 'use an internal pedometer'

Desert ants use an internal "pedometer" to measure exact marching distances, according to a study.

Researchers knew foraging insects could navigate using light from the sky, but were puzzled by the animals' ability to gauge the length of ground covered.
By manipulating the ants' leg lengths to give them longer and shorter strides, a Swiss/German team found the ants "counted" steps to judge distance.

To investigate, scientists from the University of Ulm, Germany, and the University of Zurich, Switzerland, set some ants off on a foraging trip along a straight tunnel, but once they had reached the food their legs were manipulated to either make them longer by adding stilts, or shorter by partially amputating them.
The ants were then returned to the same spot to begin their homeward-bound journey. However, the researchers discovered the ants with longer legs overshot the nest entrance, while those with the shortened legs undershot it.

Aren't you glad they've cleared that up for us. Aren't you? Now what's concerning me, in retrospect is the distance between Ulm and Zurich.

Anyways... I'm off to see if there's a market for ant sized prosthetic limbs...