Author: Alex

Spam

On By AlexIn Other stuff, Site Stuff4 Comments

In a period of less than four days, 534 different spam sites have attempted to prosecute their – frankly – shady products on the hedgehog, and all those who read her. For any of those with both chromosomes, around 532 would not have been of any interest whatsoever unless your beloved has requested a penis extension for his birthday. Of the other two, one offered a low rate interest loan from the bank of bqrwwallsiizx.com and the second promised that with just a single click, high resolution photos of Britney Spears would be available to me. “In every position you can imagine and some you can’t” allegedly and I’m quoting verbatim here.

You would clearly have to have the brainpower of a special needs haddock to even consider clicking on one of those links, and yet some people must because Spam’s random, scattergun approach is apparently successful. However, it firms up a couple of lingering suspicions I’ve had; 1/ It takes all sorts and 2/the web is primarily an electronic wank factory.

I feel quite proud to prod its’ vice ridden underbody with the occasional spike of the hedgehog. And yet, looking back over eighteen months, it appears I am not entirely blameless in some glorious stereotyping and ill considered abuse. A brief scan of 300 odd posts informs that the following groups have been lampooned, sent up, randomly abused or held up for a brief baseless examination before being dropped for something more interesting.

Countries and their people; London and Londoners, the Welsh, the Scottish, the Irish, Belgium (a staggering 7 times), the French, the Germans and almost every other major European superstate. I believe Macedonia has so far escaped any ill considered angst but there is plenty of time. To prove I’m not merely a jingoistic anglophile, I’ve also taken the piss out of Australia and America a few times as well. And there is a special mention for Milton Keynes. Someone had to.

Vocations and Hobbies; Policemen, pretend policemen, politicians, doctors, washing machine manufacturers, call centres (to the power of irritated), traffic wardens, security guards (hmm a pattern emerges), airlines, car dealers, cricket, football, rugby, folding bicycles, normal bicycles, road biking, mountain biking, bowling, golf and darts.

General piss taking stereotypes; The Young. The Old. The Middle Aged. Women. Men. People who can’t decide which they are. Professional sportsmen and women. High earners. Low earners. Family types. Singles. Pensioners. DIY’rs. Road Cyclists. Track Cyclists. Mountain bikers. My friends. Me.

Special one off “I’ll get you Butler” category; Chiltern Railways.

And that’s just a happy subset. So far this catalogue of angst has properly pissed off a total of two people. The first was a post that made me laugh but was – on reflection – a little more cutting than intended. The second resulted in me pulling an entry which I’ve never done before and I’m unlikely to do again. And that’s all you’re getting on that one.

It made me think about words tho. Not the shit I write, but the real craftsmen and women who forge masterpieces on the anvil of a million words. Wordsmiths if you like; writers who use the same nouns, adjectives and verbs as the rest of us but craft them in such a way that shock, cheer, illuminate or illustrate. What they also have in common is raising such a strong emotional reaction, it leaves you wondering if you shouldn’t just stick to addressing letters.

For me, it’s Simon Barnes on sport, Joe Simpson on mountains, Stephen Ambrose on War and then Dickens, Huxley, Salinger and Laurie Lee painting landscapes in your head and peopling them with astonishing characters. I quite like Dick Francis too πŸ™‚ It’ll be different for you and quite right too although am I the only one that cannot get on with Shakespeare? It’s not the stories I have a problem with; it’s every time he was struggling to think of a word, he just made one up. I’ve been tirelessly campaigning to have “Moonscuttle” and “Gruntled” added to the OED but have been serially and snootily fobbed off.

So, for a moment of pretentious gazing of a hairy naval, I wondered about pickling the hedgehog once and for all and sending the old fella, with my best wishes, to a warm electronic burrow in the sky.

We’ll see.

April Fools…

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding1 Comment

… the lot of us for believing barely past winters icy clutch, dry trails would abound, and the forests of the North Downs would reverberate the to the whoop, holler and occasional cry of pain from a happy mountain biker.

Here’s a spoof photo. You see, I can tell you that is from last Sunday but I know you won’t believe me.

I don’t have any decent ones to show you as that would tax my photoshop skills. Other lies include we traversed the ridgy Surrey Hills this way and that, diving off onto bar wide, secret singletrack and riding old favourites such as “barry knows best” and “telegraph road“. We were occasionally lost, mostly warm, adequately replete after a major raid on the Peaslake stores, and appropriatly refreshed after Marty supplied some post ride beer from the depths of Daisy the camper van.

In terms of lies, damn lies and statistics, the route was around twenty miles, ridden in a relaxed four hours with much stopping for a brief chat or a rather longer lie down, having breathlessly bested some of the tougher climbs. Marty brought his girlfriend along for only her second MTB ride, provided her with a heavy bike that was two sizes to big and swiftly introduced the concepts of terrifying bombholes about 20 seconds into the ride.

Amazingly she didn’t kill him afterwards but only because she was too tired. Fantastic effort tho and put some of us rather more experienced riders to shame. If I may, for one moment, remove my prism of cynicism, it is great to see someone else starting in the sport and seemingly getting the tiniest bit hooked.

It was all too good to last of course. The “sore throat of annoyance” upped the viral ante last night and now I have some kind of unspecified but quite miserable lurgey. And a sore throat πŸ˜‰

Perfect preparation for four days riding this weekend. Still it’s good to get the excuses banked early.

Happy Easter

On By AlexIn Other stuffLeave a comment

An early Easter Bunny photo with a difference.

Happy Easter

Stolen from my friend Stu on the grounds that it is childish and a little bit naughty. So ideal food for the hedgehog then.

I’d just like to add, I don’t believe I have strayed onto the wrong side of the law this morning unless shouting at the kids and kicking the cat counts.

Smooth Criminal

On By AlexIn Bikes, Road Riding4 Comments

It is a bit of a stretch to pass yourself as a member of the hardened criminal classes if you are hurtling towards middle age, wear a suit to work and rarely dismember associates with an iron bar. Unless you’re a lawyer which, in the strangest of ironies, is practically a vocational criminal offense and yet provides the legal means to defend your colleagues. No wonder it’s known as being called to the bar.

But this morning, I too have stepped across the slippery line to become a law breaker. My route out of the station is a cheeky pavement sprint in the wrong direction on a short one way street. Blinking out stinging rain, my vision was filled by two yellow jacketed, importantly hatted members of the pretend police meaningfully pointing an arresting arm in my direction.

Please stop Sir, you’re in breach of the highway code the large, rotund one intoned in a voice clearly trained to strike fear into the heart of aforementioned desperate criminals. And please vacate you bicycle as well shouted the second slightly smaller but no less self important upgraded traffic warden.

Well dear readers, I did as anyone with a social conscience would β€œ I took a hard look at the consequences of my illegality and, after just a moments pause, put the hammer down and scarpered.

I was amazed, on glancing rearwards, to find them giving chase. Suddenly my charge sheet was reading assault with a light battery, followed by the involuntary homocide of two fat policeman, and further lengthened by leaving the scene of an accident (there was going to be one in a minute). At this rate I was looking at incarceration for almost, well, the rest of my life and Panorama would be running sobering documentaries in years to come on the Stone 1

Slightly less amazing was their swift realisation that two fat policemen are significantly slower than one desperate rider screaming You’ll never take me alive copper over his shoulder. The lights changed and I charged over the Marylebone Road in the style of a Thelma and Louse cliff side plunge.

And just to prove that I have now entered the seedy world of the habitual criminal, my status as Rebel Without A Decent Haircut was confirmed with a lawless shimmy past the startled security bloke guarding the firms’ car park entrance. I shot him with a nasty grin that may have lost some effect as I rapidly had to come to terms with an illegally parked van abandoned on my line.

Honestly, some people just think that the law doesn’t apply to them. Stringing ˜em up is all they understand with their terrorist traffic violations.

Hypocrisy is the new tolerance for 2007 β€œ you heard it here first.

POST EDIT: Ah I was going to write something on why I really can’t take pretend police seriously only to find I already had!

Look outside – it’s not dark :)

On By AlexIn Bikes, Other stuff2 Comments

This winter, I have mainly been method acting “Lithuanian Lesbian” when faced with any of the following – Dark, Cold, Wet, Injury or Apathy. Last year, the joy of spring was almost unconfined as after five months of misery, warm light evenings were a welcome reward for slogging through a globally unwarmed season. I was fit, fast and generally miserable whereas this year I’ve ensued the first two and instead spent many dark hours channeling just the latter.

But having given myself a stern talking too, my lethargy is at an end and, assuming that my bikes don’t degrade into swarf or great floods don’t start a run on build-your-own-arks, I shall be making up for lost time, lost fitness and – in the case of mountain biking – lost smiles. It would be fantastic to add lost beers to that list but frankly these past few months have introduced hops and barley as a staple diet. Although properly balanced with chocolate and milkshakes so that’s most of the nutritional bases covered.

So taking Spring at it’s word, I uncoiled from a warm bed this morning to be immediately tested with freezing fog and a light drizzle. And regardless of the clock of lies, my body was sulkily explaining it was really 5:45am. I bypassed an instinctive grab for the car keys and clipped into unfamiliar pedals so annoying my semi sleeping form even more. Instead of the motorised route hard wired into cossetted muscles, I headed out in the opposite direction to a station alternate that offered more trains and – more importantly – a far superior coffee shop.

Three things immediately occured to me me – firstly I didn’t know what time the train went, secondly the current time was hidden under three layers of fuckmeitscold layers and finally the distance was nothing more than a vague memory. Visibility of thirty feet or less hardly helped as cold lungs bitched about the yomping pace demanded by an anxious brain. But the five and a half miles were dispatched in a chilly sixteen minutes, which expanded past twenty as unfamiliar cycle facilities befuddled my sleepy and un-caffeined self.

But time was well on my side and clutching a rather lovely large Latte and pristine newspaper, I strode righteously onto the platform agog at unfamiliar commuters and the odd hated folder. Still they hardly slowed the train down when dispatched onto the line with nothing more than an evil grin and muttered “get a proper bike, you trouser clipped gaylord“. Important to make the right impression I’ve always thought.

The train was lovely – all civilised tables and empty seats. The experience was further enhanced as it failed to stop at stations separated by a short dog walk or the cheery thirty minute halts that pass for an on time service on the Amersham line. Early days though, it’s still Chiltern Railways who have a hidden charter to drive all but the most sanguine passengers to suicide attempts.

So far so good but my childish anticipation of riding home in daylight were scuppered by an impromptu meeting in an off site location serving cool beverages. And the mad dash to catch the seven pm train was compromised attempting to hustle while in receipt of the weighty laptop of doom. Next time I’ll be a little more careful which box I tick when ordering said Windoze brick because the battery alone weighs the same as Croydon and could power said town for about it a week.

And because the railway company has abandoned its’ commitment to green issues, we cyclists now have around 20{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} less bike racks to save the planet with. So while my train was serenely steaming out of the station, I was running up and down the platform in a frustrated doubletake attempting to find a slot to safely abandon the bike. The satisfaction of finally crafting a coveted wall spot was somewhat mitigated by the next four departures heading off only to my old station.

But finally, I’m heading home in non sardined comfort watching the day turn to night hoping against hope that I remembered to charge my lights.

Sprung

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike RidingLeave a comment

That is what Spring has done although it is as swallows to summer, with warm, breezy days sandwiched between icy blasts and freezing rain. But warming rays have thawed out this less than hardy perennial and hacking over drying trails has replaced hibernation. Hacking coughs have also been a early season feature but I’m not one to make a big thing of it.

This is Steve Watlington Wakins recently harvested from retirement and showing old school style perfectly matching his retro bike and really rather advanced years.

Not quite as old and annoyingly fitter is Nigel who casts off winter sensibility for a bit of buggering about in Swinley Forest.

For me, it’s a case of scratching the crust off old memories of how to ride and what happens afterwards. Having crashed almost as many times as I’ve ridden this year, my downhill style has been likened to nervous lemming that has been damningly blighted with self awareness. You’re not getting me close to that cliff, no way, it looks bloody DANGEROUS.

Uphill, thankfully, nothing much has changed except I’m a little slower, a little more rubbish and a little readier with excuses pertaining to lost fitness, gained weight and some random mumbling around tyre pressures.

After the ride though, it’s the same glorious dichotomy of pain and pleasure. But I think of it as fitness pain and it is simply dulled with a quick beer or a strong brew. And either is very welcome as long as there is cake to follow. With the pain comes proper tiredness – not the kind of boring bone ache from , say, gardening – but smarting pain with an aggressive personality.

So try and run up the stairs and in it steps between your hind brain and leg muscles calling everyone out for an industrial dispute. I find it best to have a little rest until the Synapse Union and Dendrite Management have come to an accommodation. Yesterday, this took quite a few minutes and children rushed past many times, as I lay supine but marooned half way to the landing.

And the ˜Give me something to eat RIGHT NOW or I’m starting on this child’ hunger pangs are back as well. The kind of stomach wrenching non maskable interrupt that has you running β€œ okay limping quickly β€œ to the fridge and considering devouring an acre of raw broccoli.

It’s all good.

The dirty dozen of twelve riders seeking sunshine and singletrack are heading off to South Wales over the long Easter weekend. If I can shed about a stone, regain at least partial fitness and not succumb to any further undiagnosable illnesses, all will be well.

Chill Fun Cleans

On By AlexIn Other stuff2 Comments

One of the many variants of rhyming slang to describe the urban enigma that is Milton Keynes. I tried – and failed – to find a simile for “desperate wasteland” but that should in no way detract from the sentiment. There are so many problems with MK – its’ unending housing sprawl, its’ frankly bonkers road grid system and the little discussed strange outpost of the firm. The latter was clearly the template for BBC2’s “The Office” both in terms of layout and the underlying current of insanity.

But before more of that, first you cannot experience the dubious delights of the town without being flabbergasted by a road system which painfully replicates everything that is wrong with the standard US city grid without capturing any of the benefits. The US system embraces a navigational approach based on triangulation of cross streets – you know 5th street is going to be south of 6th street and that main street is the geographical centre. This makes finding you way around at least a little intuitive.

MK dispenses with this proven system, instead keeping up Roman facsimiles such as Watling Street criss crossed with really useful mnemonics including “V7 twinned with Arse, Alberta and sponsored by Admiral Insurance“. It’s the kind of place that only accountants with slide rules or obsessive internet nutters understand. And I’m pretty damn sure that the SatNav companies had something to do with the construction. Unless you have an annoying digitised voice demanding that you take the next left over two curbs and a supermarket roof, you’re destined to starve in the maze of suburbs.

The town is no better – it calls itself the call “centre capital of the UK”. This is a boast that is only just beaten to the title of “most embarrassing town slogan” by Grimsby and its timeless “Cod Basket of the East”. It is essentially miles and miles of intersecting concrete and branding desperately in search of an identity. So it’s great we have an office there.

My journey to the office floundered at the first hurdle when the SatNav directed me through a complex of lovely, traditional villages that appear to have been demolished to make room for a bypass. If it was meant to be bypassing the villages that it has concreted over, it seemed to have missed a salient point but nevertheless, I was cheerfully informed that my car was now a boat and we were surfing an unnamed river at about fifty miles an hour. I’ll not be telling Honda that the next time I make a warranty claim.

Having finally stumbled on the correct road – sorry boulevard – through a simple approach of inspired guesswork and swearing, I’m not sure I should have bothered. This is the only UK office without any fee paying practitioners and it shows. It’s an oasis of apathy with whispering replacing conversation and any outward expressions of joy seriously frowned upon.

It’s hard to create any sort of social interaction in these conditions – that is until you venture to the toilet. These are the world’s smallest toilets and feel free to sue if you want, honestly any smaller and you’d need to hack a leg off to gain entry. Socially nervous office staff have to relieve themselves into a bucket located under their desk. The rest of us squeeze in and are thrust into the personal space of complete strangers.

Honestly, once you’re a handspan away from the next mans willy, he has no secrets from you. I ended up pissing in the sink just for a bit of privacy.

The office is adepressingly rabbit hutch with the firms’ preferred layout mirroring the geometrically mean streets outside. I ran away and found a coffee bar in twenty feet of green grass and this was a very hard place to leave. When I finally escaped through a navigational approach modeled on the German blitzkrieg, my joy was tempered by the terrible truth that I would have to go back next week.

I’m praying for some late winter snow πŸ™‚

I could do that.

On By AlexIn Other stuff1 Comment

Four blokes in a pub, one says “if you could do any job, anything at all, what would it be“. This isn’t the setup for a crap joke, it’s a semi-accurate transcript of a conversation we tried to have while seeing whose liver would explode first. I say tried to have since much of the ensuing discussion focussed on the vocational potential to be permanently employed massaging Kylie’s tits or whether, at 39, it was too late to play on the wing for England.

Based on the current squad, I’d hazard a guess that you would be in with a decent shout but that’s not the point here. But it is close in that my perfect job would be a sports commentator. How great would that be? Travelling on someone elses cash to salubrious foreign locations and swapping work for chatting about stuff that a television audience can already see for themselves.

There is one problem though in that I’m too bloody English which, at best, is a nasty mixture of jingoism and cynicism. For example, commentating on an England football match where we were being bested by the People Republic of Who The Fuck Knows Where That Is, I’d cut across Graham Taylor discussing tactics with a snarled “oh for fucks sake, a hundred and thirty grand a week and they are still shit. God it’s depressing, I mean how fucking hard is it to kick a ball into a huge goal? I mean really?”

Okay so football is out, what about Rugby? A game I love with a passion but understand almost nothing. And while I could add nothing to the ten thousand offenses that a player can commit at a breakdown by apparently being on the pitch, I’d be able to make useful social comments such as “Brian, surely we cannot let our children watch this, there’s a man with his head up the bottom of his team mate and the referee has clearly asked at least four players to form a fuck“.

Cricket? The only game in the history of competition that breaks for lunch. Patriotism would out I think especially against the Australians “oh come on, give him a chance, let him have another go. He’s a lovely lad and neither of his ancestors sent any of you buggers to Tasmania” followed by a shrill “ah fuck the lot of you. What have you got? Skin Cancer, fuck all culture and a capital city that’s about as much fun as venereal disease.”

There’s almost no sport I couldn’t be chipperly ignorant about. But, frankly, compared to the chance of being curator to Ms Mynogue’s breasts, there’s got to be at least an outside chance of scamming a job.

Budgetory issues..

On By AlexIn Other stuff, Pretentious nonsense5 Comments

… now there was a couplet to strike terror into the heart of any freelance consultant. Fiscally, it didn’t get much worse than that unless the project sponsor was hit by the belated realisation that all your talk of stabilising event horizons or evangilising synergistic operating efficiencies was nothing more that total bollocks wrapped up in bullshit. It only ever got worse when your thin lipped accountant started nervously quoting sarbanes-oxley as you explained you’d bought a small yacht for the purposes of “business development“.

But even at our worst, which I grudgingly accept was on the euphemistic edge of dishonest, we were merely street magicians compared to Gorden “David Copperfied” Brown and his financial slights of hand. Politics rarely infect the hedgehog as it lacks the catharticism of other posts and leaves me wanting to throw the monitor into the local offices of the council. Plus, of course, I know bugger all about it although that is rarely a semantic leash to my random rabbit chasing doggedness.

But the porridge gobbler has gone too far this time. While one hand giveth, the other slaps you lightly about the face, joyfully explaining you’re screwed anyway. While I have absolutely no problem with a taxation system earnestly charting wealth redistribution through a sea of tax increases, I’ll be buggered if anyone is going to tell me that in some way it’s doing me a financial favour.

Personally I may more tax or I may pay a little less. Frankly, I don’t give a shit but I do care that a government that has crusaded as the bastion of public services appears to have spent everything while delivering very little. So while we’re laying off nurses and targets replace common sense, I’ve come up with a new idea. And I’m telling you because there is absolutely no bloody point in pretending that our vote offers some kind of representation.

How can 20,000 people, each driven by their own motives, imbue a power hungry arse to speak for them to an even greater power crazed circle, who themselves gave up listening about the same time the votes stopped being counted. This is not a party politics thing – they’re all as fucking bad as each other, they don’t care about your problem or your opinion but they certainly care about their own.

The US system as least acknowledges this and lets you vote directly for the President who may share some of your ideals such as bombing oil rich countries, or screwing the earth beyond the point of reconciliation. At least you know what you’re getting, rather than some pointless stuffed shirt asking anodyne questions about constituents that he cares only slightly less about that the bloke answering in the dispatch box.

They say the young are disenfranchised by politics. Good on them, maybe they see it for what it is.

Anyway, here’s my idea. In the same way that we receive good karma for sponsoring a goat or a cow in a country we once funded with slaves as the most profitable export, why not abolish some taxes and allow us to sponsor public servants? It’d be like The Sims but for real. I’ll sponsor two nurses in the local hospital and they can write me some reports on how many people didn’t die because someone cared about their welfare. I’d feel good, less people may suffer and it won’t cost the government a penny.

You see where this could go? We wouldn’t have to sponsor those public services that everyone accepts are either a total waste of time or a government revenue generator. Traffic Wardens – you can bugger off home for a start. Free Market economics with a social edge, I think it could be a winner.

I mean come on, we cannot really do any worse.