Category: Uncategorised

I was listening to the radio on the drive home and heard another of those bloody pointless studies being discussed. As usual, I can’t find it anywhere on the BBC News page, but will link to it when it finally appears. Basically, for reasons known best to themselves, Hewlett Packard have spent a small fortune wiring people up to brain scanners to work out what material possessions have the same affect as a smile.

Why?! What the hell has this got to do with a company that make printers and low-quality, overpriced desktop PCs?

Anyway, apparently a smile (dependant on who it’s from) is worth £16,000 or 2000 chocolate bars. This highlights how stupid people are. Why only 2000 choccie bars? You could buy a hell of a lot more than that for £16,000.

Also, apparently having Robbie Williams smile at you is worth more than anyone else. I can’t believe that. Smug bastard. Unless it’s him smiling at you, not knowing that you’ve spent the £16,000 on paying someone to drop a steel container with 2000 chocolate bars on his ******* head.

I’d like to know how much Kate Winslet’s smile is worth. Especially if she’s got my cum dribbling from her mouth. I know some websites that’s give you a fuckload more than a pilfering 16 grand for a picture of it.

First off, apologies for not getting the right hand bar with the charity stuff done as yet. I was hoping to have more free time this evening, but I got buried in coursework. It will be done over the weekend.

And now for something completely different… Well, a few things. Snippets, if you will.

Boing

Toyota Avensis’s bounce quite well when you reverse them into lamp-posts.

Thank **** for that.

Let down

You know, when a woman whispers to you "How long can you go?! I don’t know if I can take it any longer!" you get a bit of an ego boost.

If the next thing you feel is a cat squashing your bollocks and licking your nose to wake you up, it really brings you back down to earth with a bump.

Bugger. And Ms Winslet was really up for it in that dream, too. At least I didn’t mess the duvet like last time.

Something you don’t see every day

An annoyed guy screaming inflamatory Afrikaans down a mobile phone.

Well, it was the first time I’d see it.

Think +ve

We had one of those "positive thinking" seminars at work last week. As a result, the QC department opposite me decided to put a "positive" statement on their white board each morning. Basically, it’s always "HAVE A [word] DAY!"

I convinced them to change it to "HOOPY" for today, despite the fact that not one of them knows what it means. Funnily enough, the people sat with me in the more techie department all got it.

Are us HHG fans really all geeks?

How come…

…the one time you leave your phone lying in the office at lunchtime is the one time someone calls? And, of course, they withhold their number and don’t leave a message.

Yes, I know – "If it’s important they’ll ring back" but all the same it pisses me off as I simply don’t know. Couldn’t they at least leave a short message? Gah.

Another serious one, folks. I’ll very shortly be making an update to the look of the blog and filling up that blank space down the right. I’ve had ideas about what to shove down there for a while (adverts, silly big logos, etc), but an email I got today’s prompted me to think that there are better uses.

Thanks to Lynn Lucas who mailed me from my Toon Page to tell me about the Great North Bike Ride 2005 which takes place over the August Bank Holiday weekend. Over the last couple of years, they’ve raised over £100,000 for cancer-related charities, last year’s Bike Ride alone pulling in £30,000 from 710 entrants. The Ride – and other events – are run in memory of Lynn’s son, Christopher, who died in 2000 of a rather nasty form of the disease.

The specific charity is The Chris Lucas Trust and their current aim is to fund a researcher within the NHS. Please, if you have the time, check out their web page and consider getting onto your aged pedalo for the day! I’ll be honest and say I can’t manage it – I go to Leeds Festival over that weekend and don’t own a bike anyway! However, I will either sponsor someone (first entrant to email me with details gets my cash) or just send a donation. Can’t say fairer than that!

As regards this page layout thingummy – mail me with a good cause you support. An event, something you want sponsored for, a long-standing charity… whatever. As long as there’s a web page and a means of donating via that web page (or at the very least contacting someone via an email link) I’ll list it down the right hand side. As the list grows, please check it and if you want to sponsor someone, go and do it. I’ve not got the world’s most popular blog by a long stretch, but 5000 or so visits in 2 months tells me that there must be a lot of people passing through.

Go on – "click through" onto something worthwhile!

OK, this one really beggars belief. Police have slapped an ASBO on a suicide attemptee.

Am I being a bit naive, or is threatening someone with jail time when they’re aim is to ******* kill themself a little bit bloody pointless? In a bid to prevent her "upsetting people", this woman has been banned from jumping into rivers or hanging from railway bridges. Wouldn’t they be just as well giving her a gun and saying "look – just **** off into that room back there and do it properly"?

What next? Driving bans for axe murderers? House arrests for wife-beaters?

OK, folks. I called KFC’s head office today and got their address. It’s bizarre. You ring them and a nice receptionist puts you through to their “address line” which is basically a recorded message. Why they don’t just put the thing on their web page, I don’t know.
Anyway, please – if you hate that ******* advert – drop them a line and tell them. The address is:
Yum Restaurants International
32 Goldsworth Road
Woking
Surrey
GU21 6JT
I suppose you want to see what I wrote. *sigh* OK then…

Dear Sir/Madam,

Let me first say that I am a great fan of KFC and have been known in recent history to quite literally “live off” the stuff for stupidly long periods of time. Recently, however, I have been forced to make the harsh decision to boycott the restaurants. I have even gone as far as to blog my decision, much to the disbelief of most of my friends who know that I’ll likely starve as a result.

I am one to stick to my principles, and I am also not one normally swayed by advertising. However, the recent “operatic” campaign is just so painfully awful that I have chosen never to set foot in a KFC again until they are removed from the television. The whale-mouthed screacher who takes a full 30 seconds of “woooaooaooaoohhh” to tell her colleague that he can’t have her mini-fillet burger is a bigger deterrant for KFC than Supersize Me was for McDonald’s.

Perhaps it seems a little backwards but I very rarely jump at a new product (or decide to revisit a store I normally frequent anyway) on the basis of advertising. However, if something annoys me enough then I will find it quite easy to refuse to pass my money to that company again on the basis that they’ve wasted my hard-earned cash by paying some advertising executive who needs a kick up the back end rather than a bonus. I won’t touch Sainsbury’s because I hate Jamie Oliver, for instance. Mind, that big-gobbed woman really gives him a run for his money in the hate stakes.

I would, as such, be very grateful if you could give me a ballpark idea of when this intensely annoying campaign is due to finish its run. While my arteries are breathing a sigh of relief and the local sandwich shop is doing cartwheels at the added income, I do miss my Tower burgers.

Incidentally, I also think that another of the ads was rather ill-advised. Who on earth thought that having a bunch of “African Americans” singing about fried chicken was going to help shift burgers? What next? Watermelon desserts and a kids meal with a toy butler that says “Yus, Massah?”.

Good grief.

Yours faithfully (and with a rumbling stomach and rapidly unclogging arteries),

etc.

P.S. In readiness for this assault on the senses being binned, is there any chance you could restore the “restaurant finder” that used to be on the web page?

I **** you not. The letter is printed and will be in the post tomorrow morning.