Stuff Archives

I just landed at Houston IAH and as I was walking through I saw a sign for the “pet relief area.” The sign (which I should have snapped a photo of with my mobile) had a picture of a dog on it. If it were me, I'd have added the Mr Whippy steaming pile at the back of the dog so that it would be clear what kind of relief was going to be afforded to your pet, but that's just me. Also, my mind did wander briefly to wonder how many pets they actually catered for and whether there had ever been any problems with someone going there with a strange animal. But again, that's just me and it was only a brief thought.

We are in the middle of a mini heatwave here in the Bay Area. Since Wednesday it's been so hot here. Even in the City which is normally a little cooler than the surrounding areas. Hard to explain what this is like for those of you back home in the UK. Basically, each day there's this big fiery ball that rises in the sky called the Sun. This puts out a lot of light and heat. Try and imagine the UK, but a lot brighter, warmer and no rain. Yeah - told you it was difficult, but if you close your eyes and try really hard you might get the picture.

I've had many comments about the posts I made describing the things that were going on whilst I was ill. Generally along the lines of the fact that they were funny and I should keep them up. Kind of got mixed feelings about that as I'm pleased that people found them fun to read, but I'd rather miss out on the whole being ill thing that led to them being created in the first place.

I do, however, feel rather boring at the minute as I've just slipped back into the drudgery of the rat race and am merrily running around on my wheel. The biggest thing being that we are currently in the process of moving house, but there's nothing funny to write about that - the whole thing is rather annoying and really just leads to a lot of time being spent worrying about what could go wrong. Very unproductive, but I don't seem to be able to stop myself doing it.

So back to the illness. Well, I had to go into hospital this morning to inject myself again. They wanted to watch me do it without any guidance to make sure I was OK doing it. Everything went well and I've now graduated from the jab class and have been let back into the big wide world free to prick myself whenever I choose to do so.

Other than that, fairly boring - but I could do with a bit of boring for a while.

This site was named EastBayRag for a number of reasons:

• One of my nicknames is Rag
• Rag is another name for newspaper
• SFRag was already taken as a URL
• We intended to move to the East Bay

Well, it looks like we are finally going to be moving to the East Bay. We have sold our house in the City and have had an offer accepted on a house on the East Bay. To protect the innocent, I've changed the names slightly (but only slightly). We are selling our house to two gentlemen “friends” Well Hung and Two Stroke. We are buying the house from Mr & Mrs Hairy Mary.

It's interesting going through this process in a different country as it's totally different from the UK. The house buying process in the US is much simpler and much quicker than the UK. Basically, each transaction is separate and you don't really get into chains. Also, solicitors aren't involved as it's a pretty standard contract, so once you've made an offer and it's accepted, you're pretty much done barring anything coming up in any of the inspection reports.

What this does mean is that it's almost impossible to organize a move on the same day - i.e. to have the people complete on your house on the same day that you complete on the one you're moving to. What's more, the county we are moving to has made it illegal to do same day title transfers so we wouldn't be able to do this anyway. Apparently the reason for this is so that chains don't fall through and you're guaranteed to sell your house on the intended day. So, we are trying to time it so that we complete on the sale of our house four days before we complete the purchase of the next one. We've put a rent back clause into the contract of the sale of our house so that we can rent it back (at an extortionate amount I might add) for up to four weeks. All going well, we would exercise four days of this and everything will happen as planned.

So what can go wrong? Well, I guess worst case is if Well Hung and Two Stroke fall through for some reason like not being able to get financing. We have a backup offer on the house, but if that fell through as well, we would end up with two houses and two mortgages as we would still be obligated to purchase the one we are buying. The other scenario is that something goes wrong for us and we can't complete with the Hairy Mary's then we would be without a home. The thought of living with Karen, William and two cats in a cardboard box under the freeway doesn't appeal to me very much.

Still, they say that moving is one of the most stressful things ..... hmmm, now to do this week's vote.

The Owl and The Fox didn't go to sea in a beautiful pea green boat. Instead, the owls came down the M1 from Sheffield to Leicester in order to administer a severe beating to the foxes.

I will be gracious enough to say congratulations to my Sheffield Wednesday friends. It looks like it's going down to the wire this year. Good luck next week - maybe we can both stay up, but I'm not holding my breath.

I heard this on the radio this morning. Apparently this is from a training video or people that make training videos on how to speak English from Japanese. The idea being that they act out a situation and then go through repetition in song to force the learning.

It seems as if they put this together specifically for me. All I need to do is reverse engineer it so I can learn the phrase if I'm ever in Japan. See what you think.

(Video has been removed from YouTube due to a copyright claim https://youtu.be/miSADG9yihM)

Seems that an ex-pat Brit pub in Azerbaijan is creating a concern for the locals. The pub is named “The Camel's Toe” and apparently the locals have just found out that this has a double meaning. According to the today.az that is carrying the official word, that double meaning is “clear visible presence of a woman's vulva, as a result of wearing overly tight pants.” Part of the concern is that the Brits were pulling the wool over the eyes of the locals by using British slang.

I'm trying to figure out how they get the translation from British slang. First, there's the use of the word pants which, unless they mean underwear, would be American and not British. But most of all I'm trying to picture the origin of the term - a couple of brickies working on a site and some bird walks by wearing trousers that fit too tight and you can make out her nether region. Did the conversation really go - first brickie “look - there's clear visible presence of a woman's vulva, as a result of wearing overly tight pants.” Second brickie replies “you're right, but that'll never catch on. Say, it looks like a camel's toe - lets call it that.” I think the translation may need a little work.

I guess I can't leave this without saying that the pub is known for the camel toe liquor. But that's only because I'm sad.

Interestingly not an article about me or my health for a change, although I'm doing well - two weeks out of hospital with no complaints so far, thanks for asking. This is two articles I got from my local radio station 107.7 The Bone.

Tax Relief
April 15th is the tax filing deadline in the US and there's always talk about the stress around tax season. Which begs the question, if there's a season, when can I shoot tax inspectors? But I digress. NaughtyAmerica.com decided that it would be good to provide “tax relief” by allowing six porn films to be available for free download.

Now, I can't tell you whether these are any good or not as I've not watched any of them. What I can tell you is that I didn't see a link to the downloads from the home page of the site, but in the interest of providing a service to anyone who may want to take advantage of this offer, here's the url to the download page Naughty America 2008 Tax Releif. I don't know how long this site will stay active for, so you may want to go there now if this interests you.

Eau De Toilette Relief
Unfortunately this video has been removed from YouTube otherwise I would post a link. So, a couple of doctors in the Philippines filmed a surgery and then posted it to YouTube. The video showed them laughing and joking all the way through the operation and they are now the subject of an investigation. Quite right you may think - last thing I'd want is to see my operation on YouTube with a couple of surgeons laughing at me. Well, maybe, but would you expect to end up in hospital because you had a perfume / deodorant canister stuck up your arse?

Apparently this man offended his boyfriend by commenting on the size of his manhood. The boyfriend got upset and decided to shove the canister up the man's arse and it wouldn't come out so they ended up in hospital. The doctors then removed the item, but decided to have a laugh in the process. OK, so they probably shouldn't have recorded it and stuck it on YouTube, but I can't blame them for wanting to have a laugh. Also, don't you think the boyfriend that rammed the thing there in the first place should take some of the blame?

There's no good start to a week when you're at work and it doesn't get any better when you find out that one of your good friends died at the weekend. Casey was someone that worked at one of my clients that was a friend as well as someone I worked with. We worked very closely together on a large project that was fairly intense at times, but it ended up being successful.

After completing his role on the project where we worked together, he left to do a two year stint in Angola. He moved house to South Africa as a base for where to spend his time when he was not in Angola (the position is 28 days on, 28 days off). Tragically, he died in a boating accident in South Africa this weekend.

One of my best memories was when he left the San Francisco Bay Area. A bunch of us met up at the Exchange for drinks after work around 5:30 / 6:00. By and large it was one of those events where people stop by to say their goodbye's and then disappear. I was there from the start and, not surprisingly, was there at the end. The bar shut at 10:00, but the two of us decided that we wanted to get some more to drink so went up to the Holding Company. We weren't in the best of states when we got there and it didn't really get any better. The only thing is that we were in a slightly better state than the local nutters. We ended up getting into a conversation with these two guys who thought it was amazing that I was from England and Casey was heading off to Angola. So much so that one of them started writing poetry about it on the back of a napkin. I know it's San Francisco, but they weren't trying to chat us up, they were just genuinely weird. Anyway, probably hard to explain, but it was a great night and we ended up leaving the Holding Company at 2:00am when it closed. This was a Thursday night - Casey had finished, but I had to work on Friday and it was a killer. I've commented many times that I'm too old for this and it's probably true .... But a good laugh all the same.

Many more memories of similar good times and I hope that these continue for Casey in whatever the afterlife holds. I'll break my no alcohol stretch tonight to have a drink to him.

Cheers and RIP!

(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24095067/ [edit - link expired])

I think it was Jasper Carrot that did a sketch back in the 80's about being concerned of people that take instructions literally. This was tied to the advent of the gel stick deodorants that you took the lid off and applied instead of using an aerosol. As the gel wore down, you simply push the stick up from the bottom (nowadays they tend to have a knob on the bottom to screw ... oh err!).

Anyway, these early gel sticks came with the instructions "remove lid and push up bottom". Mr Carrott duly pointed out that taking these instructions literally may not lead the correct application of the deodorant.

Anyway, I'm beginning to think that these instructions are specifically designed for me. I'm now wondering whether there's anything that I shouldn't be pushing up my bottom. After having had many, many things poked up there and a lot of stuff coming out all too quickly, seems that this has taken its toll on the old ring piece and we've popped a hemorrhoid or two. So, was in the hospital today to start the new wonder cure (rat dna stuff) which I've had and they said they'd give me something for hemorrhoids. The product is aptly named “anusol” as that's exactly where you need to put it - up your anusol. Seems the cure for having things poked up and out of your bum is to poke more things up there.

The instructions tell me to pop in one of these suppositories at bed time. One hopes that there isn't anything expected to come out after insertion as I normally plan to sleep after going to bed. I also keep reading the instructions and linking it to mouth wash or something and expect to see it say - pop one in at bed time and wake up with minty fresh breath. Somehow I don't think this is going to happen, but it would be interesting if I started doing minty fresh farts.