Oblog Archives

It must be the friends I keep, but why are they all on the look out for a bargain? After the free bowling ball escapade, another such episode came to light last night.

I'd popped down to see a friend who is due to run the London marathon this weekend (see shameless plug), I'd gone down to give him his sponsorship money and to wish him luck. I was chatting away when his wife said, "has he told you about his latest purchase?". Of course he hadn't, so I had to ask.

It turns out that he'd been trawling ebay for bargains and he came across a piano for 99p ($2) so he bought it. It then cost him £50 ($100) to hire a trailer to pick it up and £40 in petrol to drive there and back. The downside to this is that it is now sitting in his garage gathering dust. There's no real room in his house for it, neither he nor his wife really play and his kids are far too young to start learning, but it was a bargain.

Personally I don't get ebay, it just seems like people exchanging a load of old junk.

I think I've worked out the root cause of our webmaster's current illness.

I've just finished polishing up "Andy" for a bowling session with some cream that a mate lent to me. Reading the label of "Platinum series high performance ProPolish plus" it says it's for "Maximum length and backend reaction". I think he should stick to his blue pills if he wants maximum length without the backend reaction.

What is it about a fireman's uniform that drives women wild?

Let me explain. Last night we had a bit of excitement when the local mechanics garage's car storage area went up in flames.

I didn't know anything was going on to start with; I'm used to the sound of sirens on a Saturday night. It wasn't until I heard a bang, kind of like a wheelie bin being blown over, did I think to look out of the window (knowing that no wheelie bins were out and it wasn't windy). I got into my kitchen and it smelled quite smoky, and although I'm not exactly a gourmet chef, I knew this wasn't my doing this time so looked out of the window to see a huge great big fire engine and plumes of smoke.

Of course a fire brings out lookers-on, and of course firemen bring out women, there were about half a dozen of the local hausfraus out in their nighties. The ironic thing being was that most were smoking cigarettes whilst looking.

This should be quite an unusual occurrence, but it's the fourth or fifth time this storage area has gone up, so you do wonder if it's an insurance job. It's strange that the garage is allowed to store cars that close to a residential area, I wonder if the local council will review the situation.

Ok so we moved our clocks forward and caught up with the US on Daylight Savings Time this weekend just gone. Having worked night shifts in the past, this was one of the nights you looked forward to having to work one hour less than scheduled to do so. Obviously the converse happened in October when your shift was an extra hour longer.

What I don't understand is why we still use daylight savings time. Surely midday is the time at which the sun is at its highest point during the day, but no not for the next six months. I know the argument is to give both lighter evenings and the advantage of bright mornings, but I just don't get it.

Of course what is worse, the idiots in UK think that now we are on Summer time, it must be summer. In fact on Monday I saw my first ice cream van of the year out on the streets. This is fine except the previous weekend we'd had widespread snow. I'm not sure if our American readers are aware of what an ice cream van is, hence the picture. But they sell something called ice cream but is more akin to sloppy frozen milk, and other frozen deserts and they are called Mr Whippy and they play crappy monotone versions of classics such as Greensleeves or The Happy Wanderer. Many a Sunday afternoon was spent queuing up to get a 99 from Mr Whippy. That said, when I was at school the local ice cream man used to sell individual cigarettes to kids at 10p a fag, which even those was highly illegal and quite expensive.

But not only did BST bring out the ice cream vans, but I saw two people in t-shirts, shorts and flip flops in the supermarket on Monday, ok so it wasn't blowing a gale, but it certainly wasn't t-shirt weather.

I think that our climate is so bad that even the mention of summer brings out the worst in the average Brit.

As an update - we actually had snow this weekend, flights were cancelled, yet still the ice cream vans came around on Sunday.

Not that I mean to use this blog as a place to vent my spleen, but I want to add my voice to those other web dissenters over Sky's coverage of Nascar.

It was bad enough that last week the missed the first 34 laps of the race because they were showing live badminton. I wouldn't have minded if the game involved a British team or fit women, but no it was two teams of Korean men. They also are very bad at coping with the copious advert breaks from the US coverage, handing back too early or too late.

However this week, only 5 weeks into a season where they claim to be showing the entire season exclusively live that we get "as live" coverage 4 hours later than the start time. Added to this the "as live" show is only two and a half hours long, which is not long enough to cover the entire race let alone any pre or post race activities. Even worse, the programs on at the time the race actually started were a 2 hour golf discussion show and "as live" coverage of the first A1GP race from Mexico (again no explanation as to why this wasn't shown live)

Come on Sky, get your act together, either be serious about the coverage or let someone else who can do it, do it.

On a lighter(?) note, in a recent survey, this weekend was deemed as the most dangerous to be riding a motorbike. Apparently one in seven motorbike collisions involve a Ford Focus, followed by a Fiesta and a Transit van. You've got to be pretty unlucky yo get hit by all three in a row.

Ok still not gotten around to finishing the holiday blog, but had to get this off my chest.

Last night when I went to bed I stuck on my DAB digital radio. I was after some music to listen to whilst reading. After coming back from the states where it seems that every town has at least two rock stations and even the interstate between Vegas and LA has it's own dedicated rock station, I'd hoped that with the introduction of digital and more availability of licences the station choice might have been better.

But no, the only new station added was one called Birdsong, and yes it is a case of a ronseal moment, it does exactly what it says on the tin, it plays recordings of birdsong 24x7. Who on earth wants to listen to that? Not only that but how can that be commercially viable, unless they are playing sublimal tweets that are really adverts for trill or something, they're not going to make any money.

Maybe I should shit or get off the pot and do something about it and set-up my own radio station, but maybe there's just not the appetite for a rock only station in the UK.

I'm back from my epic adventures, a full blog to follow, but I wanted to share this link to an article about one of my best friends and him running the London marathon for charity.

Localman-runs-for-son (link removed as no longer active)

I'm sure you'll all join me in wishing him all the best with the run and the fund raising.

Good luck Jon!

That's something that advertising guys at Sky obviously don't do.

We've just had the first ad break in the live coverage of the Daytona 500 (Nascar) motor racing, and not only was there an ad for nappy rash cream but also a cure for thrush. I may have mis-read the viewing demographics for Nascar but I would guess it's 95% male. Surely all ads would be for beer, cars and Lynx deoderant.

As a follow up to a previous post, on Wednesday my ex-work colleague picked up his new bowling ball and I went along to get mine re-bored. It's amazing how scientific it is getting your fingers measured for your bowling ball. Afterwards we agreed to get a few of us together and go bowling on Friday, so we did.

The price was £10 for the first two games and £2 for the next, so we paid for three games and off we went. We spent the first couple of games getting used to the balls trying to get the spin on it like the pro's do, but by the third game I'd decided to give it the full beans and bowl as hard as I could. That was fine until someone looked at their watch, said that it was still early, let's see if we can another game for £2 which we did, and then we did another.

Three hours of bowling later, I worked out that I'd bowled/thrown a 16 lbs bowling ball nearly 100 times. Surprisingly I am having to type left handed as my right arm is aching a tad.

It seems as if this is going to be a regular event so I'm going to have to somehow build up the muscles in my right arm, any suggestions how?? :)

With the protracted writers strike still dragging on (apologies for the tautology there) I came across something in the movie channels section on Sky (Satellite TV) that may fill the gap in the cinema schedules.

On channel 331, there is a channel called Nollywood. I had to look it up on Wikipedia, and it is channel devoted entirely to films from Nigeria. I guess if Indian films come from Bollywood (named from the portmanteau of Bombay and Hollywood), the natural progression is the Nigerian version Nollywood, but it does make one wonder what will come next.... perhaps...

Collywood - films about English sheepdogs
Gollywood - films starring characters from Robertsons jam labels
Mollywood - films starring Molly Sugden making references to her pussy
Pollywood - films made entirely with talking parrots

I'm sure there are more, and seeing as the caption competition has fizzled out, there's a prize for the best ollywood pun. The prize being an automotive PA system, which I appear to have become the sole UK distributor of. Good Luck.