Still waiting for Spring, though with increasing impatience. I woke up to frost and then the sky threw lumps of ice at me on the way in to the office.
It was perhaps not the best start to a Monday so I was hardly surprised when it got worse.
Some idiot spent the entire morning driving around and around the neighbourhood where I work. What gave me this nervous twitch was the fact that said idiot chose to drive around and around in an ice cream van.
Now I like Elvis as much as the next man (ice cream, too), but a whole morning of Wooden Heart played on ice cream chimes is enough to make Saint Francis of Assissi rip the heads off birds …
… or to render an ice cream vendor completely insane, so that they spend an entire morning driving around a single neighbourhood trying to sell ice cream on a day when the kids are all in school and the clouds are emptying sacks of hail on people's heads.
The title of today's post is the opening of Wooden Heart in the original German and translates as "Got to go, got to go, got to leave this town …" an increasingly attractive option this morning, I have to confess.
I'd take this world back and change it for another one if only I could find the receipt.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Friday, April 13, 2012
No I Don't Want A Fucking Cheeseburger
Had a good chuckle at this over breakfast, The antidote to all those idiot LOLcats posts.
Enjoy …
Enjoy …
Thursday, April 12, 2012
A Nice Quiet Coffee
One of my favourite coffee shops and a regular rendezvous with Joy and Thom is Little Red Roaster, a place so tiny you have to leave your bag and coat outside and grease yourself up to squeeze in there, yet famed for the total awesomeness of their coffee - these guys are serious.
They're also known for their polite if oddball signage (witness this one I found in there last summer), and somewhat bizarrely this morning, one of their polite signs got them onto the national news.
The sign simply states: "Sorry, we are unable to serve you if you are on the phone. Thanks."
Suddenly a ray of hope and sanity in an obscene world. There's been quite a stink about this, kicked up by morons who insist on holding up the queue and annoying the fuck out of staff and customers alike by rudely bellowing inanities into a small box while waving away the barista trying to serve them.
Listen up, dipshits:
Either hang up the phone and get served, or leave the queue, go stand outside - somewhere away from the door where your imbecile shouting will annoy customers a whole lot less - and come back in again when you've finished your call.
It's basic politeness. Consideration for others. Do it or I will kill you.
Most of you (if anyone still reads this dross) already know my views on mobile phones and their users.
If you want the less sweary version, let's just say that anyone who happens to be talking to me face to face and then answers their phone, waves a hand up at me and continues chatting to their caller will know that I'll simply walk away and not bother speaking to them again for their unutterable fucking rudeness.
More on this another day, but I'm starting a campaign right now for mobile phone users to be provided with small covered areas outside coffee bars and restaurants where they will be required to go (like smokers) and indulge in their antisocial and FUCKING ANNOYING habit away from people who want to enjoy their coffee with friends, talking face to face at normal conversational levels without some inconsiderate fuckwit shouting drivel at the entire establishment.
Hoorah for Little Red Roaster!
Message ends.
They're also known for their polite if oddball signage (witness this one I found in there last summer), and somewhat bizarrely this morning, one of their polite signs got them onto the national news.
The sign simply states: "Sorry, we are unable to serve you if you are on the phone. Thanks."
Suddenly a ray of hope and sanity in an obscene world. There's been quite a stink about this, kicked up by morons who insist on holding up the queue and annoying the fuck out of staff and customers alike by rudely bellowing inanities into a small box while waving away the barista trying to serve them.
Listen up, dipshits:
Either hang up the phone and get served, or leave the queue, go stand outside - somewhere away from the door where your imbecile shouting will annoy customers a whole lot less - and come back in again when you've finished your call.
It's basic politeness. Consideration for others. Do it or I will kill you.
Most of you (if anyone still reads this dross) already know my views on mobile phones and their users.
If you want the less sweary version, let's just say that anyone who happens to be talking to me face to face and then answers their phone, waves a hand up at me and continues chatting to their caller will know that I'll simply walk away and not bother speaking to them again for their unutterable fucking rudeness.
More on this another day, but I'm starting a campaign right now for mobile phone users to be provided with small covered areas outside coffee bars and restaurants where they will be required to go (like smokers) and indulge in their antisocial and FUCKING ANNOYING habit away from people who want to enjoy their coffee with friends, talking face to face at normal conversational levels without some inconsiderate fuckwit shouting drivel at the entire establishment.
Hoorah for Little Red Roaster!
Message ends.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Hello. My Name Is Dive And I'm A Pastaholic.
Fuck, I'm fat!
Hokay, time for an intervention. Time for all of my more reasonably proportioned body parts to gather round and gawp in disgusted awe at my utter rotundity.
Holy shit … I wouldn't look out of place in a Mid-West strip mall, shopping for cheese in a spray can. Not being one for mirrors and only having a top view of the corpulent crisis going on in my midriff I had been only vaguely aware of the effects of rampant inflation … until this weekend.
Last Sunday, given the choice between Easter church service and traditional family roast dinner, I sensibly opted for neither and instead moseyed on down to the studio to make an unholy racket with my disreputable friends (or at least one disreputable friend and my equally disreputable little brother).
Phil has gone all gadget-happy and spent his groats on one of those new fangled moving picture screens (an Apple eye patch I think he called it). Anyhoo, he propped the thing up on an amp while we spent a pleasantly unproductive afternoon busking old songs that none of us could really remember and songs that none of us actually knew … pretty much par for the course.
It would appear that the piratical eye patch captured some of the shambolic mess on video. The upshot of which is that I caught sight of myself standing sideways on to the camera and screamed like a girl.
Fuck, I'm FAT!
As a friend has since put it: “Most people would simply opt for conventional gender reassignment, but you? You have to be different. I mean the man-boobs were bad enough, but how the hell did you manage to get yourself pregnant?”
I took a screen grab of my planet-shaped pregnancy and stuck it on the fridge door with a big red sign that simply states “DON'T YOU FUCKING DARE!” I have another sign on the kitchen door which reads “Don’t even think about it. Turn around one-eighty and get your fat, ugly arse into the gym, lardboy!”
On an unrelated note, Nokia recently took over the company I used to use to post all my music on my blog and - to improve their service - are pulling the plug on the whole thing. So if anyone clicks on my old music tracks all they'll get is a bunch of Swedish incompetence and no noise whatsoever.
Whilst the more culturally advanced among you might consider that an improvement, I'm a sadistic bastard, so here's some of last Sunday's cacophonous crap to annoy the hell out of you and to remind me to lock myself out of the kitchen.
Knowing myself pretty well, however, I predict that dieting will be a non-starter and will be replaced by the simple expedient of never again standing sideways on to a camera.
Toodle pip.
Hokay, time for an intervention. Time for all of my more reasonably proportioned body parts to gather round and gawp in disgusted awe at my utter rotundity.
Holy shit … I wouldn't look out of place in a Mid-West strip mall, shopping for cheese in a spray can. Not being one for mirrors and only having a top view of the corpulent crisis going on in my midriff I had been only vaguely aware of the effects of rampant inflation … until this weekend.
Last Sunday, given the choice between Easter church service and traditional family roast dinner, I sensibly opted for neither and instead moseyed on down to the studio to make an unholy racket with my disreputable friends (or at least one disreputable friend and my equally disreputable little brother).
Phil has gone all gadget-happy and spent his groats on one of those new fangled moving picture screens (an Apple eye patch I think he called it). Anyhoo, he propped the thing up on an amp while we spent a pleasantly unproductive afternoon busking old songs that none of us could really remember and songs that none of us actually knew … pretty much par for the course.
It would appear that the piratical eye patch captured some of the shambolic mess on video. The upshot of which is that I caught sight of myself standing sideways on to the camera and screamed like a girl.
Fuck, I'm FAT!
As a friend has since put it: “Most people would simply opt for conventional gender reassignment, but you? You have to be different. I mean the man-boobs were bad enough, but how the hell did you manage to get yourself pregnant?”
I took a screen grab of my planet-shaped pregnancy and stuck it on the fridge door with a big red sign that simply states “DON'T YOU FUCKING DARE!” I have another sign on the kitchen door which reads “Don’t even think about it. Turn around one-eighty and get your fat, ugly arse into the gym, lardboy!”
On an unrelated note, Nokia recently took over the company I used to use to post all my music on my blog and - to improve their service - are pulling the plug on the whole thing. So if anyone clicks on my old music tracks all they'll get is a bunch of Swedish incompetence and no noise whatsoever.
Whilst the more culturally advanced among you might consider that an improvement, I'm a sadistic bastard, so here's some of last Sunday's cacophonous crap to annoy the hell out of you and to remind me to lock myself out of the kitchen.
Knowing myself pretty well, however, I predict that dieting will be a non-starter and will be replaced by the simple expedient of never again standing sideways on to a camera.
Toodle pip.
Monday, April 09, 2012
Sunday, March 04, 2012
A Different Pace
I was wandering around a twelfth century church last Friday (which may not sound stupidly busy but it is part of my job) and got distracted by this lichen. I believe the species name translates from the Latin as "lucky bastard lichen" and its sole purpose seems to be to lazily grow in the sun on an old flint church tower. It's probably much older than me but it doesn't have to worry about money or work or why it can't get a girlfriend or politics or religion or finding a seat in the coffee shop. It just sits there and basks, slooowly stretching across the face of the flint. And that's all it ever does. Lucky bastard.
I offered to swap lives with it for a few days but it just lay there in the sunshine and mocked me. I'm sure I heard it giggle as I walked off.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
The Joy Of Astronomy At Minus Eight In The Snow
Do click on the photo to blow it up (though only if you're remotely interested in pictures of stars). I'm kinda chuffed I got some colour in the nebula. First time ever. Woot!
Saturday, February 11, 2012
A Night Off
At last! A clear night after a long week of dense clouds and snow.
Out at the observatory last night, setting up Mike's ten-incher for the first time.
Out at the observatory last night, setting up Mike's ten-incher for the first time.
Here's Mike and Pete (who's selling the scope to him) looking at Jupiter while I was trying to snap Orion with my camera and feeling decidedly inadequate in the lens stakes.
The domes in the background (and a couple more off to the right) house the observatory's main scopes, while members set their own kit up outside.
A temperature of minus eight degrees (without the wind chill) proves no deterrent to the truly insane astrogeek. Having to lay in the snow to align the polarscope is a bit much, though.
Somewhere under the snow is a series of concrete pads for member's scopes, complete with power, but finding a socket last night was quite beyond anyone who didn't bring a snow plough so Mike resorted to manual guidance.
In these temperatures it doesn't take long for the smooth, grey tube of the telescope to become patterned with ice and Mike's finderscope iced over pretty early, as would we have done had we not resorted to the warmth of the clubhouse and the tea hut from time to time.
Still, we got some great views and we'll be out there again tonight, freezing off our non-essential parts.
Have a warm weekend, one and all.
Somewhere under the snow is a series of concrete pads for member's scopes, complete with power, but finding a socket last night was quite beyond anyone who didn't bring a snow plough so Mike resorted to manual guidance.
In these temperatures it doesn't take long for the smooth, grey tube of the telescope to become patterned with ice and Mike's finderscope iced over pretty early, as would we have done had we not resorted to the warmth of the clubhouse and the tea hut from time to time.
Still, we got some great views and we'll be out there again tonight, freezing off our non-essential parts.
Have a warm weekend, one and all.
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
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