Eye Candy

So here we are, right on top of the spiffy London Eye.
Boffo!

Kate was mentioning prices in the comments for the first part of this post.
The Eye is dirt cheap. Pop across to their website and you'll find the price of a spiffy, fifty minute ride to be £15.
Fifteen quid! For fuck's sake, you can't buy a round of drinks for that!
I fully recommend the combined ride on the Eye and river trip. For very few groats more, you get a boat to take you from the Eye all the way down river to Tower Bridge and back and - as you should know by all my nagging and photo posts - the best way to see historic London is from the Thames.
So book your tickets right now, Kate, and remember to turn up at ten (it opens at half past) and blag an early ride in a nearly empty gondola.

Good news for Lynn and Utsav and anyone else of a vertiginous bent.
Despite the height, you get no real feeling of vertigo.

Honest!

When the ride starts, the chickenshits tend to huddle together on the big seats in the middle, but as it goes up I invariably find more and more of them tentatively approaching the edge and going "Oooh! It's not scary at all. You don't get a sense of the height."
Because you're fully enclosed it feels safe.
So no excuses!

Anyhoo … It's the view you've come up here to see.
And of course to wave at me in my office.

So come and join us at the window and we'll take a look see.

Upriver, you can see Battersea and Chelsea and Westminster, with the Houses of Parliament (anagram: The House Of Rampant Lies) just across the Thames.

Here you can see Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence with St.James's Park behind.
My walk to work takes me along the riverside or through the park.

A bit further round and we find Somerset House and Charing Cross Station.
Follow the road up and you'll reach the Mecca of tourist tat, Oxford Street with the Telecom Tower in the background.

Right in the middle, far in the distance you'll make out Tower 42 and The Gherkin.
A few hundred yards the other side of them is Liverpool Street Station, where Old Dive starts his walk to work in the mornings.
Flick back up to the Big Ben shot and you'll see why I'm still remarkably fit.
It's about a five mile hike and I don't hang about.

Terroni was asking what Londoners think of the Eye.
We are a cynical bunch; probably even more bitter and twisted than those most English of Americans, our brothers in Noo Yoik, and so we heaped scorn on the Eye while it was being constructed.

But then we had a go and "Whee!"
We love it.
We're actually quite proud of it and feel that everyone who visits should take a ride.

It also looks pretty spiffy.

So there you have it.
Kate and Shazza are both visiting the UK this year.
Come an take a ride on the Eye.

Coffee and sushi is on me.

Old Dive's Friday Crap Hunt

Being unable to post the second half of my Eye piece today (a big "thanks for nothing" to the kind folk at Blogger for eating my photographs), I have been inspired by Shazza's marvellous Friday "Drippin' With Cheese" series to offer up a plea for help.

In a long and strange life I've managed to track down just about every obscure and trashy piece of music known to mankind, yet one alleged "song" still eludes the grasping clutch of Dive.
Perhaps some of you out there in the Colonies might be able to help.

I heard this a few times on good ol' John Peel's show back in the eighties.
I'm sure I did … yet the BBC seem to have no record of such a record.
It was a country song.
It was sung by a trucker, in the form of a prayer as he races his big-rig back across the States to make it home in time for his little girl to die of some amusing disease.
Only he doesn't make it and finishes up bawling by her grave (hey, it's a country song; what do you expect?) …
Anyhoo; I think the name of this yee-haw abomination was "Eighteen Wheels For Jesus" and I must have it! I MUST!

I thought it was by the poetically monickered Bing Hitler, but apparently this is not the case.

Please help a desperate man to find this lost chunk of crap for my collection.
There will be a reward, but knowing me it will be obscenely biological and best avoided.

Bummer

Dammit!
Stupid fucking Blogger!
I loaded up all the photos for the second part of the Eye post before I left home this morning and now I am in the office I find Blogger has lost most of them.
Bastard!
I'll have to post it when I get home.
Hey ho.

Whee!

"Ooooh! You'll never get me up in one of those!"

Ah, but I will!
Strap in and hold tight if you're afraid of heights.
If not, then jump on board!
For the next couple of days, Old Dive is going to take you for a ride on this:

The good old London Eye.
Hoorah!

It's all held together with bits of string.

Just like a bicycle wheel, except much more of a bummer if it gets a puncture.

Even from ground level it can induce vertigo.
The bastards wouldn't let me go up those steps.

For anyone who has been afraid to have a go on the Eye, you can see from here that it is indeed all made out of drinking straws and string, so it's nice and safe.

You get to ride in one of these.
Cool, huh?

This bit is for those who don't like heights.

And this is for those who do.

I sometimes sit and watch this thing out of my window, down there behind Big Ben.
Tomorrow, we'll take a look at some more scary views.
Fun!

My Cheeks Are Cracked, My Cock Is Drown'd

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, and germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!"

In case you'd not guessed, it's still fucking windy here.
Most of an elderly elder tree is currently having a lie down on my back lawn, yet the blossom on my plum trees and the stupidly early flowering cherry still clings on for dear life.

They say the gales will die down tonight, which means Old Dive goes apeshit with the chainsaw tomorrow morning.
Any passing minibus full of unfeasibly attractive college kids better watch out!
Perhaps I'd better play Puerto Muerto's "Lost Soundtrack To The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" loudly to warn them off.

Anyone paying attention will have surmised that I'm still too busy sorting out repairs to our storm damaged schools to post anything coherent.
King Lear and Leatherface … Hmm … An odd combination of post subjects but when I'm too busy to write you'll have to put up with whatever seeps out the cracks in my mind.
Sorry.

Norwegian Blues

Work work busy busy chop chop bang bang … etc.

Thanks to our delightful storm, half of our schools are currently scattered over divers parts of Norway today, so I have my hands full at the moment.
I'll post when the fan is finally fæces-free.

Thank You, Canada, You Bunch Of Twats

For once in their miserable lives the Met Office seem to have got it right.
What we've done to offend Canada I don't know, but they have flung some righteous shit across the pond at us on the airstream and it hit the fan this morning with a vengeance, billed as "the worst storm in years" by the jolly old BBC.

It is chuffing breezy in Westminster at the moment and due to get much, much worse over the next day or three.
Predictably, as I have a three and a half hour journey in to work, I arrived to find an empty office and the phones ringing off the hook with the lazy bastards who live only a few miles out of town using the storm as an excuse for a lie-in.
Now a few have straggled in with tales of trees across roads and rail lines blocked. Hey ho.

Astonishingly, my stupidly expensive "Storm-Shield" brolly lived up to its hype and survived my walk up the Thames (keeping me tolerably dry into the bargain), passing as I did several dozen people desperately flailing their trashed, cheapo brollies like semaphore signallers getting electric shocks and a load more tattered remains stuffed into litter bins, broken skeleton spokes reaching sadly skyward.
There were a couple of moments when I thought I'd be flying to Norway, Mary Poppins style, but now I'm here in the warm with latte and croissant.
Whew …
We're due eighty mile an hour winds gusting to something ridiculous when this stupid Canadian import really gets its act together, so whether I (or the brolly) make it home tonight is a matter of some debate.
If I disappear off the radar for a while, I'll be either stuck on a train, sleeping on the office floor or at home with no power (and possibly no roof).

Ah, springtime in England …
Or breakfast-time in Cornwall … photo stolen from BBC News website.
I'm glad I no longer live on the coast.
At least I've not got twenty inches of snow like poor Robyn.
Yikes!

Bwang … Thwack

Over to Mikey's house this lunchtime for some Legolas action in the garden and some frenzied online slaughtering on his Playstation 3.

Pimp my bow.
Metallic paintjob, high-tech counterbalance, everything bar laser sights.

Those cheese-eating surrender-monkeys better stay their own side of the channel.
We trashed 'em at Agincourt and by the look of things, we're ready to do it again.

Thwak!
Eat steel-tipped aluminium, Frenchie!

Hey ho. Boys and toys … Great, innit?

When Blogs Collide, Pt.18

Well woo and indeed hoo!

Not only was yesterday our ace Norwich blogger and radio star Joy's birthday (Yaaaay!!), but also the day she and Thom moved into their lovely new home, armed with paintbrushes and party food.

Don't go trying to count the candles on Joy's cake; I cropped them out as a gentleman should do.


Brown!
Auuuugh!
This is all going to be a lovely blue before the furniture gets moved in. Being a lazy slob I ducked out and did a runner before the painting started (sorry, Thom).
Joy and Thom are such lucky bunnies. They've managed to find a lovely house with big, double bedrooms and off-street parking within ten minutes walk of the centre of the city.
By the time they have finished decorating and moving in it is going to be amazing.

It even has a garden! Not overlooked, either. Though today was our first non-sunny day for ages and it was too cold for the planned barbecue.

That magical moment when the SOLD sign comes down.
I'm sure you'll all join me in wishing Joy a belated happy birthday and both Joy and Thom our very best wishes in their new home (especially as we managed to escape all the painting and decorating, hee hee).

Arbitrary Character Judgments

Just how messy is your dashboard?

For any Windoze users out there, the dashboard is a silly little thing on Macs that was developed so you could bring up a see-through screen that overlays your desktop and gives you useful information, such as weather forecasts, traffic reports, news feeds, stock prices, etc.
But Mac users aren't interested in all that crap; we want useless information. We want Jared, the singing smiley ("Luna Gardena …"), stupid fishtanks and bouncing rubber monkeys and interactive Klingon dictionaries and so a whole new industry was born: creating utterly and wonderfully pointless dashboard widgets.

I hadn't realised just what a teenager's floordrobe of a mess my dashboard has become until yesterday, when Amanda the new girl at the office came over to say "Woah! Cool! A dancing Jesus!"

Anyhoo.
Here's my current home dashboard.
Just like judging a person by their bookshelves, we can get a pretty good idea of how dorky somebody is by the crap cluttering up their dashboard.
The thing on the top left is a feed from various telescopes around the world. For folk living under England's Tupperware skies - it is nice to see what good old Sol is up to.

My dashboard has a set of Blogville Clocks, showing me which one of you reprobates is awake or asleep and the weather in London and Ohio (Robyn) … for some strange reason you can only have two weather forecasts up at the same time, so I flick mine around Blogville to see who's suffering; in this case, our Robyn.
Plus my nifty realtime earthquake reporter, so I can see how shook up poor Jules is getting in Rabaul (serves you right for living in paradise!). Click on an earthquake and it takes you to the readouts and details. Cool, if you're geeky like me.
And many thanks to Robyn for pointing me at the Etch-A-Sketch. My own miniature version of the world's first and best laptop. You actually shake it to erase the image, just like the real thing. Hee hee hee. No points for guessing the quote …

You can have any amount of comics feeds (or news feeds if you're boring). These are my defaults: Peanuts, Dilbert and Doonesbury.

I have a nifty (yet hilariously crap) Japanese translator to fuck up my homework and a wise daily saying from Family Guy.

Best of all, I have my pong clock and my hula girl.
The Pong clock shows the current time as the score, but click on it and you can play fullscreen retro Pong action! Woohoo! There are any amount of stupid games you can play: Pacman, pinball, all the usuals, and they're all free, of course and one click makes the whole lot disappear and brings back your desktop for when the boss is about.
As for the hula girl (a man's GOTTA have a hula girl! She reminds me of Joe vs. The Volcano and teases me with the - admittedly remote - possibility that a young Meg Ryan might walk in and carry me off to a desert island … sigh), leave the cursor in the corner of her window and she shimmies 'til the cows come home. You can get a Hula Jesus, too, and there ain't nobody shimmies like the risen Jesus.
Old Dive is seldom happier than when all around me the office is running about like headless chickens and I'm leaning back against my lumbar support and sipping green tea, whilst my cute li'l hula girl is shimmying just for me.

At the office, I have webcams from Venice and Norwich (the American ones are dark when I'm in London), but at home it's NYC and San Francisco, looking across the bridge to Sausalito, which is somewhere I'd like to live if they could only stop those pesky earthquakes.
I also have the inevitable fishtank, a dancing Jesus and one of those plastic monkeys whose limbs are held together with string and you press the bottom and he dances and jiggles around. Anyone alive in the sixties will know what I mean.

Basically, good, old-fashioned retro childish fun for anyone who never wants to grow up.

So. What's on your dashboard? Screengrab it, post it and let's make arbitrary judgments about your character.