It cheers me to see that Microsoft have been forced to abandon their masterplan of uploading IE 7 whether you wanted it or not. It’s a shame the choice you’re offered isn’t a little more real world honest though. Instead of some anodyne “Internet Explorer 7 is ready to install, do you wish to continue?”, surely it would be better to offer “Do you want yet another piece of bloaty Microsoft code on your machine or would your rather load up a proper browser instead? Click OK to load Firefox or “I’m a bloody idiot” to continue”

Maybe it’s a change for the good. Do you think we can look forward to, for example, Powerpoint asking “shall I stop trying to be fucking clever and just let you draw a box?” or Word presenting an option “Before I randomly reformat your entire document ruining two days work, would you like to save?”

For a proper, reasoned discussion on the whole subject of Microsoft Windows, please take a minute to visit the wonderfully abusive unencylopedia. It’s kind of work safe if you’ve an understanding boss.

I’m with Bob on this one but if I may be allowed to live his 80s lyrics in the moment, it’d be more I bloody hate everyone on Monday’s’. Agreed it doesn’t scan quite so well, but factually it’s a hit.

Last week the electronic ticket machine greedily gobbled down credit cards without coughing up anything other than an electronic parp. The human equivalent performed lamentably in terms of queue management, instead choosing to restore the machine to a working state through a violently escalating troubleshooting technique ending in him kicking the shit out of the door.

This week they’ve gone one better and neither the machine or the ticket inspector/computer repair man was working. The repercussion was an obvious hundred grumpy and ticketless travellers arriving at the Marylebone terminus. Well obvious to anyone with the thinnest slice of intelligence, which instantly disqualifies Chiltern Railways, who instead blindly worship at the altar of revenue.

Rather than admitting their enterprise class fully resilient IT systems were in fact undone by a ˜hygiene operative’ inadvertently plugging in the vacuum cleaner and sending us on our way with an open turnstile and a forthright apology, instead they queued us like cattle facing the abattoir. The tailback was queued so far up the platform, geographically it was in the postcode of South Harrow. A single Butlin’d uniformed employee of the bank of railway wickedly traded his poisoned chalice for a heavily thumbed notebook and a blunt pencil.

Yes, customer service soon became customer irritation as this one poor lad licked, frowned and consulted several notebooks everytime a frustrated passenger asked for a single from Stoke Mandeville. Still help was at hand as the arthritic ˜B’ team parachuted in from their extended tea break with electronic copies of his desperate notebook. Sadly they’d received neither the requisite braincells nor training to operate them and entire epochs passed as they failed to navigate the complex menu system dreamt up by a descendant of Columbus’s navigator. That’ll be a single from the East Indies and to hell with the specifics.

Continue reading “I don’t like Mondays.” →

To paraphrase George Best, I’ve spent all my money on sport and beer and the rest I’ve just wasted. Right now it feels like a tax on the stupid and I must be due a rebate. Here’s the reasons:

Cricket

Australia aren’t beating England. Because in being beaten, the losing team is at least competing. In the last three days, England have managed one session in which they aspired to parity. And every morning, a brief Internet surf shows that somehow last night was even worse that the one before. We score a meagre 157 with all our players, while Australia lope easily to 188 losing just one man who appeared too apathetic to run. Still fair play to the fella, we were clearly never going to bowl him out and he fancied some time out fishing while his colleagues smacked the cherry around.

Some of this is undoubtedly the fault of our crowing media that labeled the Australian team as too old to compete at the highest level. Last time this rather high risk strategy saw ˜Dad’s Army’ steal the Rugby World Cup from under the Australian’s noses. But our team “ even shorn of a couple of key players “ looks undercooked, overawed and heading for an embarrassing capitulation over five matches.

Rugby

Still at least we’re losing to the best team in the world playing the only game which breaks for lunch. On the Rugby pitch we’re losing to anyone who turns up in West London looking for a game. First the Puma’s deservedly won their first ever match at Twickenham and now the South African’s have slayed their St. Geroge’s dragon in a rather more unworthy manner. Last week, we had much possession but few ideas during the last twenty minutes, and sneaked a win by hiding the ball up our jumper.

This week, we threw away an eight point lead through a larcenous combination of indiscipline and incompetence. South Africa have their pub team touring the UK and Ireland showed quite how rubbish they were. But, and I feel a surge of pride at this, England made them look fantastic.

The coach will be sacrificed, the team will move on” and come the Six Nations and latterly the World Cup, every team will see us as a home and away banker while we’ll trade on fading glories.

Football

Okay, I accept that Sheffield United never pretended to be world beaters or even any good. But hanging onto the thinnest of thin slivers this weekend, I deludedly banked my sporting happiness on us crafting a draw against a London club which isn’t bankrolled by a few squillion. Oh, I see checking the web that indeed they now are. Anyway we had our chances but didn’t take them and are left languishing at the arse end of the table hanging precipitously over a huge revenue drop to the lower leagues.

And that’s to be expected but it was like the grim reaper receiving an early Christmas present of a nail gun. Which he’s enthusiastically applying to the coffin of English sport.

I really wish I didn’t care. It’s not as beating your head against an unyielding desk can in any way change matters. But it’s the manner of defeat which rankles, we’re either chicken in the face of an opponent who’ve mentally bested us off the field of play, before we crumble once upon it. Or we’re headless chickens running around chasing the ball in a perfect parody of seven year olds playing football.

It really doesn’t matter does it? At the end of the day, sport is just nationalism dressed up in a track suit, and surely living in a country with a healthy economy, supplying allegedly well funded public services and cosseted in a generally risk free environment matters more.

Well that should be the case but it isn’t. We take all of that for granted while sport offers us the chance to bask in reflected glory, but with that comes the responsibility of feeling impotent and angry when our team gets stuffed.

We may have invented most of these games but unfortunately every other nation subsequently punctured the myth that arrogance and birth right in some way determine the result, before actually strolling out onto the pitch and giving a shit. There are many problems with English sport ranging from apathy through misadministration and ending “ as these thing inevitably do “ with money. Too much of it to the wrong people rewarding the wrong things.

Still it could be worse. Much, much worse; you could be a citizen of a nation with fantastic weather, superbly confident sporting teams and a chip on their shoulder the size of Manchester. I’m sportingly depressed to be English right now but the alternative would be to have born an Australian or a South African.

You see, I told you there was reason for optimism. If I can institute a media blackout over the next month and pretend to enjoy the cold and dark, Christmas will be here and that’s a reason to be properly miserable.

My Antipodean friend is encouraging me to write a standard we were crap” article lambasting the English Rugby team who have turned Fortress Twickenham into Fill Your Boots, Twickenham. I cannot spin any positives when it’s obvious that we lost the 15 a side Falklands rematch, due to our highly paid team missing some basic skills such as Catching” and Throwing”

But I thought I’d wait until the triple whammy of Rugby League and Ashes Cricket crank up the humiliation and mental pain of any fool supporting English sport.

Until then, enjoy these cheesy nuggets of humour retrieved from the rancid remains of the Internet bargain bucket.

The English rugby practice was disrupted today when an unknown white substance was found on the practice pitch by some player. Head coach Andy Robinson immediately suspended practice and called the police, after a complete analysis by forensic experts the unknown substance was found to be the try line.
Practice was resumed when the RFU decided the players were unlikely to encounter the substance again!

Andy Robinson takes the England team for a training session, first up he tells the players to take up their normal positions, so they all go behind the posts to wait for the conversion!!

The RFU set up a helpline for disappointed fans after a disastrous season the number is 0800 10 10 10.
That’s 0800 won nothing, won nothing, won nothing!

There are two man made things can be seen from space,
The Great Wall of China and the hole in the English defense

What’s the difference between English team and an arsonist?
An arsonist would not waste 17 matches

Although the last one is mildly amusing. We’ll be fine tomorrow, beat the boks a million to nil and all shall be right with the world. Until the first Ashes test “ someone pass me a blanket and a large drink.

POST MATCH EDIT:
Result never in doubt then 😉 And there was even scant consolation for being stuffed in the RL match with the Aussies after the bog trotters gave them a good stuffing in the fifteen man game. Right, Ashes then, I’m feeling confident but it’s been said – and by professional people who know their stuff – I’m deluded.

Not so much gags about dropping your pants in the misguided pursuit of comedic merit, more a transcription of a microcosmic example of what happens where corporate life and bodily fluids collide. Although not in the truly physical sense “ well at least I hope not.

A man of a certain age is left with few pleasures; one of those remaining is a full and detailed review of the sports pages while communing with nature. And not in this modern willy in one hand, IPAQ in the other whilst wetting the urinal rubbish. I’ve mentally lambasted those nonses cracking off an email or checking out the football scores, when their attention should really be on what’s in front of them, or as happens rather more often, what’s leaking onto their shoes.

No I’m talking old school, slam the door shut to trap 1, perform the trick of dropping your strides while simultaneously rustling open the paper, and plonk yourself down on the thankfully unwarmed seat and think of England. The social variant of this process calls for a hearty cough to disguise the unfolding in case of other occupants prowling in this last Bastian of the male.

So obviously a communal gasp (or possibly gas) escaped both of us when we realised that the trap next door was occupied. Oh the stomach plunging embarrassment of being caught in loco paparis with literally your trousers round your ankles. This situation demanded a mature response, and in that vein I settled comfortably and refused to make even the tiniest sound until he wiped and ran. Unfortunately he too evidently couldn’t face the social stigma of being outed as a thunderbox rustler and adopted exactly the same ploy of total silence.

We’d probably still be there now except for a desperately difficult situation unfolding in Trap 3. The final cistern was being noisily breached by a man who’d clearly had a bowel full of sprouts in his recent digestive history. It put me in mind of The Ride of the Valkyries” arranged for Rectal Oboe and Small Intestinal Trumpet. Think of the kind of sound a horse attempting to play the trombone may well make and you’re right in here with us.

This went on for some time.

Continue reading “Toilet Humour” →

Reality TV generally leaves me cold. It’s a formulaic ritual where grandstanding prima donnas screech at each other in some lurid juxtaposition of vainglory and fame. But Gordon Ramsey is always worth a watch; you have to hand it to this man with a pan, who is now serialised and handsomely paid to bully people and call them fucking wankers. It’s nice to see such jobs being shared outside of sales managers and executives who believe such an attitude ups both their virility and importance.

Last night saw old Slam Dunk Ramsey laying about himself with special vitriol saved for, what I’m thinking of as, the Prawns Of Wrath. The young boy, funded with his dad’s cash, who was allegedly running the restaurant shared almost none of Gordon’s cooking skills but matched him toe to toe for arrogance. Ramsey, clearly furious that this oiky underling failed to understand the basic premise that God was in the kitchen, sent him out bullfighting. Apparently this was to make the lad understand the importance of instruction from an experienced practitioner. It was a brutal and lazy physical metaphor to begin with even before the increasing gored and terrified participant ran for cover. It would also have carried significantly more weight had the instruction had any effect whatsoever other than to beat the bloke into submission and subsume his ego to that of Flash Gordon.

The format is such that it’s impossible for the restaurant to fail any more spectacularly whatever the great man does. Short of grilling its’ customers or serving up family pets, the makeover is destined to generate an upturn in its fortunes. So essentially it’s a rigid set up for a middle aged man to swear and bully his way through an hour before returning triumphant to the stirring sounds of his ego being serenaded. We all know the ending before we start watching and yet watch we do as the textbook unrolling of incredulence, stupidity, cajoling, enlightenment and finally mutual affection unwinds off the plot reel.

But I think it’s great and can’t wait for the next one where hopefully a ritual disembowelment of the sous chef during a team bonding jousting session precedes a bitch fight with frying pans. Someone shout at the BBC ˜Now THAT’S public service broadcasting’

Domestically untroubled by cooking, it’s unlikely old Gordy will ever pop round to our house to check out my signature dish. And with it being Beans on Toast enlivened by a Lager chaser, that’s probably no bad thing.