The Opposition's Manifesto

We, The Evil Cabal Of Evil have read Dazza Moo's manifesto, which he posted here last week, and have decided that it cannot go unanswered. Therefore, have erased the post that he originally put up this evening* and replaced it with our own Manifesto. We think you'll agree that it is much better than Dazza Moo's.

The Evil Cabal Of Evil's

Manifesto

Economy
This is very simply addressed: If every person in the country subscribes to Sky, reads the Sun, buys an iPhone and uses Microsoft Office, we will make a shit-load of money. Making rich people richer is very good for the economy because of stuff and things.

Environment
Green things are completely unnecessary.  The future is indoors, not in the countryside.  We will chop down all of those pesky trees and get rid of all that mucky wildlife.  You will all live in shiny, white cubes, like the future of the sixties and eat pills for dinner. We, on the other hand will dine on bacon and roast beef from our secret island livestock farms.

Jobs
This is one thing that Dazza Moo and we agree on. We will channel all available funding into building Steve Jobs' cloud mind a giant robot body with which to subjugate the world.

Sustainable Energy
Your cubes will be lit by solar power during the day. Once it gets dark, you will sleep.

The Welfare State
It's simple. If you work, you will get fed. If you don't, you won't. Please note that your family may be charged a nominal sum to have your remains cleared up in the event of joblessness.

Education
All the education that you need will be fed to you through our products. You will want for nothing.

Crime and Civil LibertiesThere won't be any. Not with a giant Steve-Jobs-Bot roaming around, subjugating.

Health
Your healthiness will be measured by your productivity.  See 'The Welfare State' for more details.

( * which was excellent, by the way - it was called 'The Adventures Of The Ninja Teacup Pig' and was by far the best post Dazza Moo has ever written.  There were several excellent illustrations as well, one of which is here:

The rest were even better, but you will never see them. Muah ha ha!)

My Manifesto

I was recently talking to the Fish Lady about politics. Yeah, I know. Me and politics. Hard to imagine isn't it? But it's a thing that happened.

After a few moments of making sense, the conversation degenerated into a discussion about what sort of manifesto I would concoct to get elected. This went exactly as you would expect.

The Dazza Moo
MANIFESTO
Economy
This is something that is foremost on everyone's mind. What should we do about the economy. To me the solution seems simple: We should upgrade to Business Class. There's more leg room and you get free drinks!

Environment
We should definitely have one of these. Otherwise, where would we stand? Or sit?

Jobs
I think he should be brought back from the dead, quite frankly. Apple seem a little bit confused without him and I kinda miss his plotting!

Sustainable Energy
Since we're rapidly running out of fossil fuels and no-one wants nuclear power plants near their house, or offshore windfarms or hydro-electric plants, I guess there's only one thing for it: Put unemployed people on treadmills.

The Welfare State
Well... all the unemployed people will be on treadmills, so they won't be unemployed any more. So they won't need benefits. That just leaves disabled or sick people, who absolutely should be paid benfits. And anyone caught faking disablement or sickeness will be disabled with a state approved baseball bat, so that they qualify properly.

Education
People should stay in school 'til they stop being stupid. That might mean that people stay in school for their entire lives. But they're stupid, so I don't care.

Crime & Civil Liberties
As far as I'm concerned, people have the right to do whever they like, with one exception: don't be a dick. So how about this: if you're a dick, you go to prison.

Health
I will pass a law requiring everyone to be healthy. Job done.

Finally, Spider-Man's dead uncle once said: 'With great power comes great responsibility' and I think there's something really valuable we can take away from the Spider-Man comics: primary coloured, skin tight unitards are awesome!

Staring At The Screen In Horror And Disbelief

I was recently told by a workmate that they were amazed at how much work I got done, considering I never actually looked busy.

Well, obviously I had to make further enquiries and what i discovered was this:
In order to considered 'busy', one has to pull this face at one's computer screen:


To me, this expression looks quite a lot like horror and disbelief, which leads me to conclude that all the so-called 'busy' people are actually watching videos of their mum performing fellatio on a camel, or maybe Gordon Brown having a poo on their cat*.

What concerns me is that these people stare at their screens with this expression all day, every day, which suggests that they're watching these videos repeatedly. Which in turn suggests that they're obsessive pervert sickos.

Needless to say, I won't be modifying my 'busy' face to suit the Oral Camel Posse and the Gordon Poocat Brigade. I will, however, start calling the 'busy' people the Oral Camel Posse and the Gordon Poocat Brigade, because it makes me chuckle, and will make me look even less busy!

( * one thing that recently caused me to pull this face was a conversation between Dr K and my mum about the book '50 Shades Of Grey'. There, look. I did it again. )

Musings

This week's blog post is a day late. Again.

Sorry about that.

Now, today, I don't really have one big thing* to blog about. Instead, I have three smaller things that, while they may not be worthy of a blog post of their own, add up to a perfectly adequate blog post. There's a picture and everything!

The first thing is a short rant about rainfall.

It seems that people are incapable of remembering what the weather was like in the past. Indeed, all they seem able to do s look out of the window and convince themselves that whatever it's like outside at that very moment is what the weather's been like since time began.

Take, for example a post by a friend on Facebook recently, where he bemoaned the fact that it had been pretty much raining since October. He conveniently forgot the fact that we'd just had the driest March for nearly 60 years, with 25 days of sunshine. In fact January, February, March and May 2012 all had significantly below average rainfall based on the 1979-2000 data on which the Met Office base their figures, leaving only April and June with significantly more rain than average.

So yeah. We've had a dry year. In the words of the twin-set lady:


On to less ranty stuff, now.

Dr K and I were enjoying a bit of rock music, courtesy of the Kerrang channel, when Muse came on.

'I assume,' said Dr K, 'That you're getting Muse to come and play at my birthday party this year.'

'Sure,' I said. 'They'll have to come in disguise, though. We don't want hordes of fans crashing the party.'

'What will they come disguised as?' asked Dr K.

'My fingers,' I said. 'Look, this one is Matthew Bellamy.'. I extended my middle finger for her inspection.

She hit me.


From domestic abuse to cats, now.

Dexter appears to have developed a new meow over the last week. Rather than his usual, rather girlish meow, he has acquired a new, huskier, deeper meow.

It's possible that he has developed a sore throat from rocking way too hard at a Karhu gig.

Or maybe he just has a cold.

I suspect it actually has something to do with the new addition to our household, though.

Perhaps he's trying to sound tough in front of the kitten.

I choose to believe that the stress of putting up with Higgin's nonsense has caused him to develop a 60-day smoking habit.



( * Yeah, yeah. Get your snickering out of the way now. )

Public Service Announcement

I regret to advise that there will be a delay to your regularly scheduled blog post this evening.

This is due to continuing work on The Perturbed Dragon.

Your blog post is currently being prepared and will be with you tomorrow (Monday) evening.

In the meantime, here is a screenshot of my current scrabble game with Dr K, to entertain you. And, yes, there is a big wank in the middle of it.

Finding The Higgs? Easy Peasy!

On Tuesday, almost completely by accident, I managed to do something that the top men* at CERN have spent millions of Euros and several years trying to do. I found the Higgs.

Well, okay... Maybe not that Higgs. Let me explain:

I'd been missing Rochester quite badly and I knew that at some point I'd want to get another cat, to keep Dexter company. So, I started to do a little research into local cat rescue organisations with a view to, in a few weeks time, giving one of them a call to see if they had a kitten, or maybe a young cat that needed a home.

And then I saw a photo... Of a kitten... A rescue kitten that needed a home... A kitten that was available immediately...

So, I now have a fluffy black kitten called Higgins. Or Higgs. Or Higgly Wiggly Woo. Or The Higmeister. Or Higloo. Or 'The Professor'.

Far from being grateful for the company, Dexter is pretty disgusted by the whole thing. Mostly he tries to ignore Higgins.

So your blog post today will be a series of heinously cute kitten photos. To take the edge off the disgusting cuteness of it all, I have added a few helpful captions.






















Finally, because he's into pretty much everything, he's been critiquing my blog:




So tat's it for another week.

I'll do my best not to waste any more of your precious reading time with kitten pictures. No promises though...

( * Who? Top. Men. )

Beard Aid

Apologies for the lateness of this week's post.  My flimsy excuse has something or other to do with me being a way for work and then having a family thing and then...  you know what?  I just forgot, okay!

Anyway...

I'm not quite sure how it came up.  I remember that Dr K and I were in the car on our way back from town - perhaps after visiting the supermarket, or getting a takeaway. 

And we were talking about something.  I have no idea what we were talking about, but at some point, one of us uttered the fateful words 'beard aid'.

'Beard Aid'.  I know, right?

Once those words had been spoken, all traces of the previous conversation were immediately forgotten and we embarked upon a far more hirsute discussion, the result of which is the following short list of things that 'Beard Aid' could be:

A delicious fizzy soft drink, the chief ingredient of Beardade is beards.

An autoimmune disease, Beard Aids affects the beard, rendering it far more susceptible to infection by things you really don't want IN your beard such AS, say, badgers.  AND that's good Beard Aids.  You definitely don't want bad Beard Aids.

Beard Aid is a massive benefit gig to raise money for starving beards in Africa.

A beard aid is a zimmer-frame type contraption that provides support to injured, disabled or elderly beards that cannot support themselves.

Whatever a beard aid is, you can bet that it's awesome.  Because beards are awesome.  And anything that aids something that is awesome is at least equally awesome.

Welcome to the end of my post.

My Two Robots

Today the awesome guys at Romotive sent me a robot.

Well, actually, they probably sent it ages ago, but because they live a gazillion miles away, it only just arrived.

Here's a picture of my new (iPhone powered) robot, with Lego R2-D2:




Awesome, huh? My two robots.

There must be a sit-com pilot in there somewhere!

'Ready Player One' Is Not A Good Book...

I actually wrote this book review for a forum, somewhere on the interwebs, but I have such an irrationally strong opinion about it, that I feel the need to post it here too as a public service.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

Lets see...

MARY SUE!!! Check

One dimensional characters: check

Terrible prose: check

Tell, don't show: check

Derivative nonsense: check

Worse dialogue: check

Lists of things instead of world building: check

Astounding and unrealistic deductive feats: check

Don't bother describing something - just say that it's like this other thing from the 80's. And namecheck the movie, TV show or game it was in EVERY TIME! In case someone misses how clever you think you're being: check

Fundamental lack of understanding of how computers work: check

Black lesbian character that only exists to prove that the author is not only cool with all genders, ethnicities and orientations, but is cool with all genders, ethnicities and orientations CUBED! At the same time! How cool is he? Yep. Check.

Unintentionally (presumably) sexist and racist characterisations of everyone who isn't the main character: check

Deux ex machina ending: check

It's not just that I don't like this book. It's a bad book. It's like a ten year old has read the Wikipedia entries for William Gibson, Philip K Dick and Neal Stephenson, written some bad fan fiction and then, just because, used the Wikipedia entry on the 80s to bulk it up a bit. It's all been done a hundred times before, and every single time, it was better than this drivel.

I could live with it if it wasn't, despite all the evidence to the contrary, getting rave reviews from almost everybody. Have they actually read it?

I have.  And I feel dirty.

Advice For A 13 Year Old Me

A couple of weeks ago, I was given a cake by a 13 year old boy.  In return, I gave him some valuable avice: never eat yellow snow.  I know, I know.  It's an oldie, but he was 13, so he's probably never seen it before.

I also accidentally said a bad word in front of him (and his mum), which just goes to show that I'm just not cut out to hang around with kids.

The cake was nice though.

Anyway, it got me to thinking.  In the event that I manage to invent some sort of time travel device, what advice would I give to my 13 year old self that will stand him in good stead over the years?*

Well...  here's my list:

1. Don't say bad words to children in front of their mums.  They don't like it.  The mums that is; the kids are fine with it! 

2. Curry is brilliant, and the hotter it is, the better.  Start acclimatising yourself now, instead of waiting 'til you leave home.  It'll be worth it! 

3. When you get made redundant in a few years, don't worry about your move to Bristol.  It's brilliant here and there are some amazing friends to be made. 

4. Grow a beard at the earliest opportunity.  Beards are awesome and the earlier you start, the bigger it'll get.  Also, it'll really pi... er... annoy your Mum. 

5. Lost doesn't get any better.  Really.  It doesn't. 

6. You don't have enough Star Wars Lego.  Even when you think you do, you don't. 

7. Speaking of Star Wars, don't get too excited by that prequel. 

8. No-one else has a clue what's going on either.  This goes double for anyone that claims they do.

9. Dr K lives at [REDACTED].  Go straight there.  Do not pass Go.  Do not collect £200.  Actually...  free money always comes in handy.  You can collect that.  But then go to Dr K's house.  She makes muffins.  

Okay, so it's probably not the bet thought out or useful list in the world.

What advice would you give yourself?

( * obviously I never will invent a time travel device, because I never did get this advice when I was 13. )