Be still my beating heart

Grim news in the village, as the grocery store where I used to buy my cheap booze has closed down.

In truth, they were fucked the second Sainsbury’s rolled into town, Sainsbury’s is half the size, stocks half the stuff but is newer and, for some reason, more popular. It’s also more expensive, so go figure.

This means that I now buy my booze from the Offie. I get served by either Aussie Guy, Facial Piercing Guy or Offie Girl.

Guess which one I’m going to blog about.

Just once, I promise…but what do you do? OG is…actually, I have no idea what she looks like because I went in to buy a bottle of wine and when she was serving me I noticed she had a low cut top on. Then I thought she thought I was staring at her boobs, so I can’t make eye contact, I’m certainly not looking at her chest, or at her. The poor woman must have thought I was special, was going to rob the place, had a twitch or all three.

I grabbed my wine, mumbled good evening and fled.

Such social ineptitude is acceptable today, but a few years hence…who knows. Because I think that in a few years time, we’ll have computers integrated into our clothing, maybe a heads-up on glasses or contacts and so when you look at a bar code you can get product information and when you wander into a public place you can see the MyFace profiles of other users, hovering over their heads (posted a 20 year old photo on your profile, taken before you discovered dunkin’ doughnuts? Let’s see you explain that in real life).

I know that some supermarkets have singles evenings where people have badges showing availability status and that in Japan you used to use a special device…but now just use your mobile…to have a sort of singleton profile so that if you’re on the bullet-train platform and you’re into manga, spanking and being bombed with atomic weapons and somebody else shares your interests, your ‘phones beep.

But I reckon that what’ll happen is that we’ll combine this with sensors of other people’s heart-rate and so on, so we’ll be able to tell if somebody is attracted to us. We’ll keep them talking, pull up their credit history and when the big red ‘loser’ sign comes up, it’s time to move on.

Until then, I guess that women will just have to rely on low cut tops and, after selling a bottle of wine, go into the back room, touch up their lip stick, smile into the mirror and say ‘men are such fools’.

Ice Road Truckers

Some television is wallpaper, some television is moving wallpaper, some television is interesting and some television..you look at and just go ‘what the fuuuuuuuuuuu’.

Such a programme is ‘Ice Road Truckers’. Ice road truckers appears to be a programme for people who think that dog-fights, bare-knuckle bear baiting, WWF, demolition derby’s and war is for poofs.

Basically you have truckers. Big rigs. Ice and more danger than you get by sticking your mustard-smeared cock up a tiger’s arse. These guys drive big rigs with huge loads over the Canadian highway in winter. Why? Because that’s when the lake freezes enough to bear the weight of them. Oh yea, driving on the ice-covered road is the easy bit, they regularly have to pull over to let a guy in a mobility scooter pass. But driving a lorry on ice…that is just a tad interesting.

Actually it’s fascinating stuff, because these are tough guys working in extremes and it shows you why that rock on your engagement ring cost so much – because the diamond mines they haul stuff to are in inhospitable places. Best bits are when the weather closes in and visibility is zero, but they can’t stop because they’ll sink through the ice. You basically have a bloke in a cab peering through the window going ‘fuckfuckfuckfuck’ until he hits the next turning.

Mind you – I remember a few years ago we went to The Maple Leaf off of Covent garden for a beer, and blizzards had closed down Canada, so no imported lager. Where were these ‘hard men’ then, eh? Eh?

Size is the issue

Is big or small beautiful?

iPods are tiny, but venerated as design classics. Airplanes are getting bigger, so are cruise liners. Obviously the shipping industry is squaring up for another one-to-one with an iceberg and this time they fancy their chances. Computers are getting smaller, but the e mails that we get are all about how to make bits of ourselves bigger!

Cars are getting smaller too – well, some of them. The trend seems to be that if the car manufactures make small cars, people will sort of forget that they run on petrol, not fresh air, and that smaller, cheaper cars mean more people can have them. So, more traffic, just in smaller bits. It’s like a fat kid who thinks if he eats broken biscuits he won’t put on weight. At the same time, we have cars on steroids – and these are not military style things or even 4x4s, these are normal family cars – well, normal family cars that appear to have been not so much designed as cross-bred with small lorries.

There’s no doubt about it, the majority of cars are getting bigger – either that, or the people that run car parks are out once every few weeks re-painting the lines closer together.

I bet big cars really fucked their grand plan for squeezing in a few more cars into their car parks – a day will come soon when they’ll have to repaint with the lines wider apart – just like the airplane designers kept the same number of seats, but because we’re all so lardy now, the plane had to be made wider. If they don’t widen the lines nobody will be able to get their doors open and we’ll be faced with the prospect of people exiting their cars via the sunroof. Comical, but hardly practical.

I think though that the prize for the most ridiculous idea in the automotive industry has to be the stretch car. There’s only one reason for stretching a car – it’s so you can paint it pink, go up against Dick Dastardly in the Whacky Races and call it the cockmobile. A good reason is NOT to ferry round a bunch of women on a hen night out of their skulls on WKD blue.
The trouble is, they are not even stretching character cars anymore. Time was when it was a limo being stretched, or a hummer, or a mini (and what is the fucking point of that? If you can’t pull the Italian Job in it, it’s not a mini, you German tossers), but they now appear to be stretching people-carriers. Huh?

I want to see the stretch transit. Room enough for builders, equipment and a tea bar. And I want it towing a caravan.

Loo trolls

If you drink as much as me in as many places as me, you end up going to the loo in quite a few locations. Many of them are provided for that purpose, some – like the ones that pop up at the weekend in streets are al fresco and a touch too French for my liking. When having to urinate in public in lit conditions, I always ensure that I have a bag of grey powder about my person – I cover myself in the stuff and pretend to be an ornamental fountain.

More often than not, meritorious matriculation takes place in the pub loo. These can vary from palatial Victorian cathedrals to relief, constructed from marble, glass and mahogany, all the way to the sort of place where you visit once and then move on to shorts or just quietly piss yourself so as not to have to visit again.

What puts me off the most when visiting these places of not the puddle of piss so deep that there’s a chain ferry or stepping stones required to get across it, or even the bloke vomiting WKD blue into the lavvie – no, it’s the toilet attendant – the loo troll.

When the hell did it become accepted practice for a bloke to lurk in the loo and attempt to spray you with perfume? In my day lurking in toilets was the job of Scout masters, the clergy and junior staff-members of some of the choicer public schools. If you went in for a pee and you saw a bloke shuffling around you expected to be offered cock, not a squirt of blue stratos.

Of course there were conventional lavvie men. In larger lavvies you need somebody to keep the place tidy and replace the loo roll. But a bloke on a stool who, the moment you roll in, turns on taps and offers you paper towels? I think not. And mints? Bloody mints! Oh, yes, great idea, I’ll have a snack from a lavvie. Actually, no, just inject me with cholera, I’ve not got time to eat.

If you want a tip mate – here’s one – stay away from a chap when he’s taking a leak.

The thing is, these guys are just about expected in posh loos, but I came across one in a bloody Orish o’theme pub. What? Did the management know he was there? As you can imagine, it was pretty horrible in there and frankly I wasn’t sure whether to tip the guy or give him a medal for sticking around in those conditions. In the end I kept the money and spent it on beer – it’s what he would have wanted.

As for this place…it’s not a lavvie attendant it needs, it’s a decorator. This gorgeous example of the art was reached by a staircase so steep I had to rope on at one point – obviously a crude method of determining your state of inebriation. You need a stiff drink to muster the courage for a return trip.

Same old same old

Legend has it that there are little frogs in the Amazon that spend their entire life in the pool of water formed in the upturned petals of the flower of a tree. Imagine what sort of culture shock it would be for that little frog to jump from one pool to another – a visit to a whole new universe, with the possibility of fresher water!

While telly and the internet is a whole tree of ponds, ready to decant onto us if we so want, I think that most people are content to stay in their own ponds. They watch the same programmes or types of programmes (and it appears that the worse a programme is, the more varieties there are of it – for instance there is only one ‘antiques roadshow’ but they appear to have cloned ‘Shite Idle’ (certainly some of the contestants looked like failed genetic experiments) and there must be some vast factory somewhere, possibly a converted factory farm, churning out shows where fat people attempt to beat the hell out of one another while the host/ringmaster looks on. I think one of the factories is in Essex, the other is in Asscratch, Nebraska.).

So it is that when people get cars, they don’t equip them with a compass, 7,000 US for bribing border guards and take off to see if they can drive to Ulam Bator, but rather zoom around the same old roads at dangerous and noisy speeds.

Similarly, I think people go to blogs to read about the same old thing, written by people writing about the same old thing. Nothing wrong with writing about what interests you, but if what interests you is the human condition, especially your own human condition and you think you’re writing about the same old thing, is this a good thing? Or maybe I’ve had a new insight into the same old thing?

Probably not, but the frog thing was prompted the sight of a pint glass that is STILL in residence on the low, flat but inaccessible roof of the local train station. It’s been there for months now and, resting at a 45 degree angle, is half full of rainwater that is turning cloudier as, I’m sure, all sorts of organisms start to thrive in there. Not sure what would emerge in ten million years time when one of the building blocks of your life was Stella – possibly a more intelligent version of whoever flung it up there. The sight of this little urban rock pool prompted a memory of a Terry Pratchett piece about the little frogs and their pools – at least I think it was TP.

The thing about the glass is that it’s the sort of thing that normally fills me with what I’m pretty sure is fast becoming a popular emotion for people – undirected anger. The thing is that the things we should get angry about are so huge that we can’t find anyone to blame. Not just the exploitation of the poor, the evil praying on the weak, no, I’m talking about rubbish littering streets, about people being ill-mannered. The problem is that you can’t go around burning down Tesco’s and McD’s, just like you can’t chase down a corridor after somebody who didn’t hold a door open for you and beat the shit out of them with your shoe. (You can’t, I checked in the staff conduct manual).

I guess that last part is more directed anger too, but you can’t act on that either and so it becomes frustration. For example…
What sort or person is so f**king stupid that they park across two lines? I wasn’t even affected by this, just thought it was a typical example of empty-headedness. Makes you wish you had a spray can so you could paint the line over the top of the car.

As for the glass - now when I see it, I think it’s kind of pretty. It’s been there so long that it’s not shiny or bright, it is probably home to a thriving – but tiny – eco-system. I suppose one day somebody will remove it or throw a rock at it and THEN I can have my moment of undirected anger but, at the moment, it gives me an undirected sense of well-being.

Up and under – with fizz

The six nations is underway, which means that every weekend I can be found sporting my replica Scotland shirt and screaming at the television.

Screaming at the television is a very different occupation to shouting at the television. Shouting at the television is what you do when you are confronted with stupidity. This is, of course, something that happens every day in real life and we put up with without comment, but I’m buggered if I’m going to let it happen in my own front room without remonstration. Usually shouting at the television happens on the hour, as this is when news bulletins are broadcast.

There are occasions when the screaming turns to shouting and these are less to do with the performance of the team than the performance of the commentators. I don’t know what it is about rugby commentators but they are, at least the domestic ones, the most negative breed of people I’ve come across.

If a team wins, it’s because the other team made errors and beat themselves. If a team loose, then they are written off for the rest of the tournament (interesting to see if they learn the lessons of England’s amazing performance in the World Cup).

The real issue though, is the narrow lexicon of rugby commentators. A few seasons ago, you could not watch a match without hearing a commentator opine that ‘they’ve left themselves a mountain to climb’ when a side go more than ten points down. (Wales apparently left themselves with a ‘hill’ to climb on Saturday. Presumably we can look forward to other landscape protuberances being pressed into use, I especially look forward to hearing that a team has a tumulus to climb, as I’ve often seen them marked on maps but have no idea what they actually look like).

If they go fifteen points down, then ‘you’re just playing for pride now’.

This season, apparently, is all about fizz. Is the team fizzing, in a state of fizzment, has there been sufficient showing of fizz? With a new stock phrase added every year, by 2020 you won’t need a commentator at all, just a randomiser.

To me, commentary should be limited to who is passing to whom, how the pass was achieved and what local club they play for. If it’s the player’s birthday or his wife has just had a baby, this may also be mentioned. It used to be that commentary options were either listening or turning the volume knob down. If the match was on the radio, one listened to the (better) radio commentary as a matter of course (especially if it was Test Match Special). Thanks to the digital age, one now has ‘commentary options’ when watching a match. These though, are fairly restrictive, telly commentary or usually the local radio commentary from the home nation.

It’s coming to the point where I’m going to mute the teevee and stick on some music. You know how they cut together the ‘best bits’ of the match into a montage at the end and play ‘beautiful day’ or something over it? Well, imagine the whole match being like that.

Not so super

Spin the random wheel o’ news to generate a story – klik klik klik global warming klik klik extremism klik Supermarkets! Great.

Apparently the Competition Commission reckon that there should be more competition between supermarkets, or something. I dunno, I didn’t bother to read the story, I already know that Tesco and Asda are evil – look, you see a guy dressed in a grubby clown suit standing at the railings of a primary school rubbing a dead badger over his crotch, you don’t need to know where he lives or what his middle name is to know it’s wrong, right? Just as I don’t need all the facts in order to spout off.

I think the basic idea was that it’s been recognised, yet again, that supermarkets >gasp< screw their suppliers and >shock< build up land banks to stop rivals building near them. Years of study and lots of tea and biscuits later comes a report that this is wrong. Que some ex-director of Asda saying that the suggestions (some bloody moderation at least) would be harmful.

Supermarkets in general are grim, but Asda and Tesco are the worst. Tesco is the place you go to see parents hit their kids but Asda, Asda is the place to visit if you want to see morbidly obese people hunched over their reinforced trollys wandering the aisles like the souls of the damned.

These are battery shoppers. Just as industrialised farming has given us chickens that live in horrendous conditions under bright lights that are, as a result, tasteless and artificially plumped up with liquids, so they have taken the same principals and plied them to the customer. That’s why you get fat tasteless shoppers in Asda, bloated on coke.

Local grocers do exist. You can still visit a shop where you have to scrape the mud off your carrots rather than the pesticides. One of the biggest complains about supermarkets, especially the big ones, is that there’s no interaction. Well, that’s easy to fix. Arrange for you and your friends to all visit the same supermarket on the same day. Spread out your visits but all make sure you use the same check-out person. And, talk to him/her. Ask about their family, their school, their holiday plans. Have a conversation. Then tell your friend about it so that they can come in and start the conversation with ‘how’s little Jenny? Bet she’s really looking forward to that visit to her Nan’s this weekend huh?’.

Do it, better than that, mobilise MyFace – all you consumers with your 10,000 ‘friends’, have a day of action where we all talk to the check-out staff. Our supermarkets will hum with conversation and become true community centres. Maybe.

Meeja circus

Here in the UK the coverage of the US primaries (does that make the November elections secondaries?) has been, if not at saturation point, then at least very damp. I guess the cynical among us think that UK interest in US elections is justified because it’s important to know who’ll be setting foreign policy for the next four years* while the even more cynical think that it’s low season over here for politics and so all the media have migrated to the US in order to grow fat on expenses claims and saturated-fat laced coffee.

The media are doing a valiant job trying to explain the US voting system to Brits, who kind of gave up after that whole ‘hanging chad’ business. They’ve been working even harder to convince us we should care. But if we want to know about what’s going on, we’ll rent ‘Primary Colours’. What’s most impressive is the sheer amount of razzamatazz that is injected into the whole affair. In fact, I’m not aware of any other context that the word razzamatazz can be used in. It’s like one of those tiny sea creatures that live near – but not too near – volcanic vents on the sea bed. They can only live in the very few inches between the extreme heat and extreme cold – the area scientists call ‘toasty’. Like them, ‘razzamatazz’ can only exist in the presence of streamers, whooping, hollering and televised debates that look like they could spill over into cage-fighting at any moment.

The media are concentrating their attention on the Democratic hopefuls, hoping that come November they’ll be able to flog the phrase ‘first woman’ or ‘first hint-of-beige guy’ to death. This means that when a republican is elected, all the people writing books about Bill being the ‘first husband’ will be chewing the carpet in frustration while the biography of ‘rich white guy you never heard of who is now Prez’ will be flying off of the shelves.

Over here we have impending local council elections. Oh yea. Wonder what sort of coverage they are getting in the US? The build up to it may not stretch to automated ‘phone banks (or as I like to call them ‘nuisance calls’) or razzamatazz like they have in the US, but it does involve some fairly heavy leafleting (as described in the ‘new year, new nazi’ post) and, the other night, a rather large and sinister man in a hat and anorak combination that hinted at body parts stored in his freezer expounding the virtues of the Conservative Party on my doorstep.

Brits are funny about getting ‘phone calls from computers. We’ve never trusted computers since seeing ‘2001’, Skynet scares the hell out of us and there’s always that sneaking suspicion that the gas board billing computer has a malice subroutine. The only computer we trust is EARNIE and that’s because he never picks our numbers and so completely conforms to our expectations. Not for nothing are the lottery numbers picked by a low-tech bingo blower. If it was just a box pushing out numbers, we’d all be suspicious.

I think if we received a call from one asking us to vote for a particular person, the combination of technophobia and intrusion of privacy would be overwhelming; leading to tutting in the very stongest possible terms and, who knows, a midnight visit to the mainframe with a cricket bat with some masonry nails hammered through it for some radical reprogramming.

* Well, at least until the EU elect a President, then I think that the EU will declare war with the US as a result of an escalation about the importation of fruit. It’d be cool to see UK troops occupying New England again.

Raddled

I am currently riddled with the tail end of a cold. Not flu, I know that whenever a man gets a germ that results in the increased use of tissue and consumption of hot lemony drinks he describes it as flu, but this was not flu.

Flu results in joint pain, head pain and a general feeling that 40% of your brain and about 99% of your energy has gone for a holiday at the sort of trailer park featured in the film ‘the last starfighter’. It also means you have disjointed, infected slumber where you yourself dream about taking a holiday in that trailer park. This is of course nonsense because the trailer park in question is residential.

Yesterday was, if I’m honest, a bit of a blur. I had a reaction to the allegedly ‘non-drowsy’ hot berry drink I was using to ease my cold. Well, actually it was hot berry laced with all sorts of chemicals but surprisingly they concentrate on the berry goodness element of the drink on the labelling. What I remember is a sensation of hot ribena and then waking up at two in the afternoon feeling a bit queer and not at all surprised that housewives get hooked on painkillers, it makes the dull bit of the afternoon go quicker than two sherries and an episode of ‘antiques roadshow’.

Attitudes to illness change by age and gender I think. If you’re a bloke, you are instantly on your guard about confessing to any illness because your wife or girlfriend, sensing that this may be a ruse to guilt her into bringing you an endless supply of drinks and snacks while you lounge on the couch under a blanket surrounded by paperbacks and watching ‘lord of the rings’, will advise you that compared to menstrual cramps, your mild nausea is nothing. This is bad for two reasons, firstly because it makes you feel like a wuss and raises the possibility that you should be the one delivering the snacks, drinks and hot water bottles every month until menopause, hysterectomy or a mercy killing and secondly because ugh…who wants to talk about menstruating?

Blokes tend to bear external pain with fortitude. Got your head trapped in a lawnmower? Run it under the cold tap and it’ll be fine. It’s when our own bodies rise up against us that we feel pathetic, especially if it’s the result of some germ getting the better of us.

Which is why this morning when I woke up, I thought I felt better than I did yesterday, then I coughed for ten minutes and knew I was better than yesterday, as that was a twenty minute coughing spree that, if it had gone on any longer, could have been considered performance art and got me a grant.

Yesterday was odd though, three berry drinks in a day meant that I was in a mild daze all day, spent the afternoon asleep and went to bed early. This is excellent practice for retirement.