Archive for the 'Ranting' Category

The Washing Rage

Published on January 31, 2009 in City Living, Ranting and Renting. 2 Comments

Well it’s been over a week and the letting agency hasn’t even managed to come out and take a look at my antiquated, broken down washing machine. It’s just this kind of behaviour that makes me all the more determined to start up that landlord review website that I posted about a while ago.

They’ve assured me that it will be handled as soon as possible, and that they’ll phone me back when they get hold of the repair contractor. That was yesterday morning though and I don’t hold out much hope of it being fixed this weekend.

Pinderstriped

Published on January 11, 2009 in People Be Fools, Ranting, TeeVee and Whiiiit!?. 0 Comments

I see the latest series of Celebrity Big Brother has begun to infect the airwaves with its txt-voting powered so called entertainment. The Sun and the Daily Record are agog that the first person evicted is glamour model Lucy Pinder. Now normally the next paragraph would be filled with a rant about how I don’t think being a so called glamour model is a valid career choice, but for once, you’re wrong.

You see I’m amused and bemused at the intelligence and to a certain degree the humility shown by Ms. Pinder after her eviction. During the post eviction interview when asked why she thought she had been voted out by the public Lucy replied, “It’s probably because I have not got my clothes off.”  She elaborated on her decision to say that she “was really uncomfortable. I take my clothes off for a living but there is a time and a place for it and it’s totally different when you’re in a house with 10 strangers.” Good on the lass, I think she made the right decision, especially after reading the Channel 4 Big Brother bio. It really gives you an insight into what the producers were looking for:

Spotted sunbathing on a Bournemouth beach in 2003, Lucy’s rise to fame has been spectacular – helped in no small part by her, ahem, assets. And in case you were wondering, they are a 32G.

To be fair though they do list quite a few facts about her including the fact that she’s got 11 GCSEs and 2 A-Levels, but clearly she’s been hired mainly cause she gets naked for a living.

Lucy Pinder herself of course probably knew this would happen. She went onto Celebrity Big Brother for the cash and the media exposure. Just like every other person appearing on the show. The big brother producers however were hoping for a few ratings boosting scenes of her in a bikini, or with any luck, a few topless shots. They even went as far as to create a segment obviously designed to prompt her to get her stripped off and on show called news in briefs, but she managed to confound them all by wearing a hoodie and some spotty pants that put paid to any ratings boosting titillation that might have gone on.

I think it’s time we just admitted that Big Brother isn’t serious entertainment, or an important social study into the interactions of strangers in a confined space. It’s just the television equivalent of watching a fish tank, except in this fish tank you get to txt-vote off the fish one by one.

Just so that nobody thinks I’ve gone soft on the universe though I would like to say that I think the term glamour model is an unnecessary euphemism in this day and age. I think we should just get over our post-war social inhibitions and start calling them what they are: titty models. That’s right, you heard me, titty models. Don’t get me wrong though I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense. I just wish for once people would start calling things like they see them. These women, for good or ill, make a living out of being good looking and having nice breasts, but from a purely technical standpoint the photography doesn’t make them any more glamorous than a bog standard model. In fact given that the majority of them spend their career appearing in lads’ mags and downmarket tabloids I would go as far as to say they’re hardly glamorous at all.

Fat Fighting F*ckwits

Published on January 6, 2009 in Fitness, Food, People Be Fools and Ranting. 0 Comments

Well the first full working week of the New Year is underway and the annual weight loss resolutions are being made. I’ve already forcibly had to remove myself from the canteen and several other public areas at The Work to avoid the local population’s discussion of their fat fighting plans.

So far I’ve seen one five foot  nothing fatty restricting herself to a thousand calories per day, and those consist mainly tuna by the looks of it. Several other dieters have decided to try the latest fad diets which range from the cookie diet to simply attempting to not eat at all. None of their ideas are physically, or more importantly, psychologically sustainable in the long term and I’m already taking bets as to which one of them will be the first down to the snack machine next Monday.

Naturally not one of them has chosen to moderate their alcohol intake, increase their physical activity or do anything that actually might actually have any real effect. Six of them have joined, or rejoined, a gym and several have signed up for all sorts of low impact aerobic classes. Not one of them has considered parking their cars at the far end of the car park though because that’s too far for them to walk.

Every time I hear them chattering on about diets and magic pills I want to grab them, give them a shake and say, “Look it’s not rocket science, just take in less calories than you use in your day to day existence and you’ll lose weight without damaging yourself.”

Sh*te To Rook Four

Published on December 17, 2008 in Gaming and Ranting. 2 Comments

It may be an arrogant and prideful stance, but I like to think that I’m a fairly smart man. I also like to think that I’ve played my fair share of games of chess over the years. I’ve won, and I’ve lost. In fact if I’m brutally honest with myself I’ve lost more games than I’ve won by a fair margin. Generally El Kat beats me hands down every time we play, but at least she doesn’t remorselessly keep track of every single one of my defeats. Unlike Chess Titans the chess game that comes with Windows Vista.

The damn game is driving me round the bend. Even on the easiest setting my tried and tested strategies have been roundly defeated by the superior processing power of the machine. What started out as the odd relaxing game of chess has fallen victim to my infamous Gamer’s Frustration. Now even my folks are getting concerned about the amount of swearing that occurs with each mounting defeat.

I can’t for the life of me see how someone less than a chess grandmaster could hope to take on a computer at chess. The things can calculate every possible move in a fraction of a second and decide the best possible course of action. I suppose the only advantage I have over it is that I can plan several moves into the future. That’s providing it doesn’t use its magical chess powers to telepathically detect precisely the right move to piss me off.  Currently the game is winning 14 to 0, but I’ll take any win I make as a personal ultimate triumph. Nemesis thy name is CHESS TITANS.

I’m beginning to wonder if anyone out there can actually beat chess programs on a regular basis. (Mainly because the only other solution is that I’m crap at chess.)

QUITE FRANKLY YA BASS

Published on November 18, 2008 in Jabber, Musings, Ranting and Teh Madness. 2 Comments

Recently the ever observant Man They Call McDowall has pointed out that I like to say the phrase “QUITE FRANKLY.” Well QUITE FRANKLY I think he’s just jealous that I’ve got an internet catchphrase and he doesn’t.

It has been noted by a few others that I have a couple of common phrases that I use. One that has been a subject of debate recently is my habit of saying “do you know what has always bugged me?” This statement is normally followed by some strange, outrageous or tangential statement. It has been suggested that I collate them into some kind of long list and publish it, a sort of “You Know What’s always Bugged Me?” miscellany.

Here’s a few to start off my list.
  1. People with History Degrees that are having far more fun and success than the average history graduate (me). Timmy Mallett is the perfect example of this: he gets to hit stupid weans and students with a hammer for a living.
  2. The fact that I spent years gazing at the weekend TV listings wondering what kind of cop show or action adventure show The Hitman and Her was. Imagine my crushing disappointment when I finally found out that it was a show about disco’s in Yorkshire.
  3. Middle managers who use spreadsheets, specifically Microsoft Excel, to do the job of any and every other type of program from databases to report writing software. Mainly they do this because they can’t work any other program.
  4. People at bus stops who walk into the middle of the road looking to see if a bus is coming: especially on long stretches of road. What is the point? The bus won’t come any quicker if you stand out there and you won’t see it any easier.

You're A Showaah!

Published on October 30, 2008 in Humour, News, Ranting and TeeVee. 2 Comments

Just incase you missed it The Daily Mail Brigade down in England are up in arms yet again over Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross leaving lewed answer machine messages for the actor Andrew Sachs. Seemingly Brand has boffed Sachs’ granddaughter and he and Ross thought itwould be a jolly jape to tell Sachs’ answer machine about it during their show on Radio 2.

Naturally the Prime Minister and various political chancers came crawling out of the woodwork to throw in their own tuppence. What was an open and shut case of liable has suddenly become the centre of a media frenzy that thankfully has distracted us all from the Kredit Krunch and war in the Middle East. No wonder Bin Laden wants to blow us all up.

I don’t really give a shit about any of this though. THere’s only two things I’m concerned about:

One – When it’s going to get the hell out of the news

Two – Why the hell is there a picture of STALIN behind Russell Brand in the video of his apology?

Seriously! Take a look:

I’m sure there’s some kind of witty and ironic reason why that picture is there but I refuse to acknowledge that Brand is either witty or ironic. I therefore conclude that the picture is there because Brand is an ARSEHOLE.

It got me wondering what the rest of Brand’s flat might be decorated with:

A Chaudry Doesn't Live Here

Published on October 23, 2008 in People Be Fools and Ranting. 0 Comments

Ladies and gentlemen I have an announcement to make, and that announcement is this:

FUCK YOU ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND.

I am sick to the back teeth of getting letters through the door address to a person that doesn’t live and has never lived in my flat. The address is similar to mine, but the postcode seems to indicate a block of flats about a mile farther along the street. I’ve consistently marked these letters as RETURN TO SENDER: NOT KNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS and popped them back in the post, but still they come. I finally got fed up with their pish the last week and opened up one of the letters to find out who was sending them. It turns out that this one was a demand for settlement of an unauthorised overdraft from and a threat to send in sheriff’s officers to recoup the amount.

Naturally I baulked at the idea of sheriff’s officers turning up at my door because some asshole miles away can’t manage his finances. Doubly so because RBOS can’t get the addresses right in their database so I called up the number given on the letter to put the matter to rest.

More fool me.

I got shunted from pillar to post through half of the RBOS’s switchboard until I ended up in the grandly named debt recovery and risk management department. There a disinterested corporate automaton explained that they were very sorry I had been troubled by the letters. However they could only discuss the details of the account with the account holder. Fair enough I suppose: Security and all that has to be a priority after all.

“You’ll contact them then?” I asked. “And check the address?”

“I’ll arrange for someone to contact the account holder and verify the address,” said the Automaton.

“Good,” I said. “Thanks very much.”

Today I got another letter in with the same return address. Obviously nothing’s been done to update the account information. I wonder if I’ll get a better reaction by returning it like this:

Oh and Mr. A. Chaudry of Paisley Road West, Govan, Glasgow. If you’re out there could you please, for the love of all things good call up the Royal Bank of Scotland and tell them your damn address before I personally start coming up there and nailing their buring corpses and letters to the lampposts outside your house.

Best Regards,

Grey Kodiak.

The F*** Factor

Published on October 6, 2008 in Music, People Be Fools, Ranting and TeeVee. 0 Comments

THE WORK is abuzz with prattle about The X Factor, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what the attraction is. Sure there’s some misanthropic enjoyment to be had watching Simon Cowell and co. telling a bunch of no talent imbeciles where the stage door is, but that’s is pushing the limits of my interest.

Let us make one thing crystal clear about the whole thing. It’s not an exercise in finding the next big thing in British pop music. It’s purely a setup to create car crash television. Vast swathes of people have nothing better to do with their time than to sit in front of the goggle box txting their lives away on the voting lines.

A lot of people today think the world owes them something, especially those under the age of twenty. They don’t want to put in the hard graft and rise to the top through a mix of perseverance, talent and sometimes blind luck. Maybe they’ve always been like that and I’ve only begun to notice it because I’m getting a bit older. Then again I don’t remember anyone I knew being such a self centred arsehole as many of today’s youth.

Now we’ve got the X Factor and shows like it to feed their narcissism, and with it we’ve got every jackass who thinks the world owes them something on our telly. Worse the vast majority have about as much talent as a turd with Mr Potato head features stuck in it. Take these two characters in this video:

Notice that they don’t actually want to make music. They want thousands of fans and millions of pounds. Naturally they’re going to achieve their ambition solely by breaking every glass in the house with their piss poor renditions of songs that were piss poor when the original artists did them. Worse we’ve got teenagers forgetting the lines to songs and then having panic attacks because they didn’t get picked on the show.

I’ll admit that manufactured bands are far from a new concept. From the Monkees to Boyzone people have been desperate to cash in on the latest fad. The big music giants take in some naive young pretty boys and girls and die-stamp them into a carbon-copy group after group. Take That, All Saints, Bananarama. The list is endless. The vast majority sink without a trace as soon as their gimmick goes out of fashion or a new fad comes along. Some actually have some talent of their own hidden underneath the corporate marketing and emerge as true singers, songwriters or musicians. Ronan Keating emerging from Boyzone is a good example even though he’s never going to escape that first appearance with Gay Byrne on The Late Late Show:

Still after you watch his mad dancing you wonder if the talent was there at the beginning or it was left in one of his orifices when Gay Byrne pulled out at the after show party.

Do you want to know which kind of musician I really respect? The ones that do it for the fun of it and at the same time manage to keep themselves in work. I’m talking about the wee bands that turn up at wedding receptions or jam out in a backwoods pub on a Saturday night with a few beers. They’re out to make music because they enjoy it and making a few bob is incidental to their enjoyment.

To the rest of you wastrels I say get a job and I’ll see you in the real world.

Someone Needs to Dump on Hollywood's Childhood

Published on July 29, 2008 in Movies and Ranting. 2 Comments

Like most of the western world I’m getting fairly apathetic towards the current slew of remakes, reboots and regurgitations coming out of the Hollywood Movie Machine. Worse the few genuinely original ideas seem doomed to mishandling, miscasting or simply being downright crap.

Take Hancock the latest Will Smith blockbuster for an example. The core idea was fairly originally and engaging: What if the world’s only superhero was an alcoholic, self pitying jakey who’s only redeeming quality, his attempts to selflessly help people all is constantly (and humorously) marred by the way he goes about it. It could have been a great comedy movie but instead the Hollywood Movie Machine made it into something else. It swung bizarrely between action movie and comedy while steamrollering over plot holes without even a moments hesitation.

The Editing Room deals with Hancock’s problems in a far more witty form than I’ll manage here, go and check it out. I’ll wait, my rage for my next point knows no bounds of time, space or angular dimension.

Now I’ve been reading on /Film about the forthcoming GI Joe Movie and almost every single piece of available information makes me want to set fire to Hollywood. In fact it makes me want to invent REALLY SLOW FIRE and set fire to Hollywood with that.

When I was a boy I had GI Joe stuff, well it was called Action Force here in the UK but it was essentially the same thing with a few decals changed. For those of you unfamiliar with the toys etc, it was all about a unique team of US Special Forces. They were a hodgepodge of every branch of the US armed forces all hand picked for their skills and abilities. No two of them were alike and they all dressed in less than regulation style. One of them was always cutting about in an American football top for a start. They all had cool code names like Snake Eyes, Gung-Ho, Roadblock and they had everything a boy could want: Ninjas, marines, spies, fighter pilots and even astronauts. They were lead by General Hawk and represented truth, justice and the American way.

They were pitted against Cobra, a terrorist organisation with seemingly limitless resources that constantly concocted bond villain-esque plans to rule the world. Cobra was lead by Cobra Commander who spent much of the time with his face hidden either behind a mirrored face mask or underneath a blue hood.

The battles between GI Joe and Cobra spanned pages of comics, a cartoon series and several animated films all of which continue to this day. The comic tended to be darker and more realistic than the films and notably cobra seemed a far more credible threat on the printed page rather than the cartoon’s bunch of incorrigible ragamuffins.

Unfortunately it seems that Hollywood have thrown all of the rich background out the window in favour of one of these god damn REBOOT things. The director Stephen Sommers and the screenwriter Stuart Beattie have managed to make a boatload of stinkers between them. The mummy returns and Van Helsing to name some of the worst.

Sienna Millar as the Baroness doesn’t convey the look or feel of European Aristocrat. She looks like a naughty schoolgirl in that picture. Christopher Eccleston is a good actor and I’ve seen him in a few things I liked, but he isn’t Destro, they should have got a REAL SCOTSMAN to play a Scotsman for once and wheeled in James Cosmo.

Roadblock isn’t in it, and even if he was I bet they wouldn’t cast Ving Rhames as him. Dennis Quade hasn’t been an action hero since the eighties and even that was as a microbe in Inner Space. As for the rest of the cast, I can honestly say I’ve never heard of ANY of them. I’m assuming they’re the latest batch brewed up during happy hour at the POD PEOPLE factory.

The worst insult of all is probably the casting of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander. I mean seriously? Just look at his pictures on IMDB, the guy looks like cross between a chimp and a Toby Jug. I think that’s as close as you can get to being genetically related to a bell-end without actually being a bell-end. Listen here to me Hollywood and bury this project before it goes any further, these people, these so called actors are not, will not and can never be the one’s to play anyone in GI Joe except maybe some walk on parts in the deleted ROOM FULL OF ASSHOLES scene. Cobra Commander has never been friends with anyone in GI Joe, let alone a former member of it. I mean what was wrong with his original back-story? A man pushed to the brink of insanity by the greed of big business and the indifference of the US government? Too close to the reality for millions of Americans in the process of losing their homes and lives maybe?

The one bit of casting I have to agree with however is Ray Park playing Snake Eyes. He’s got the skills and since he doesn’t have to speak or even be seen it should be an easy ride for him. I will brace myself for the inevitable Snake Eyes spin off movie however.

Hollywood I dare you to prove me wrong, I dare you to make this the movie of the year for 2009 but to be frank I think everyone who see it will be of the same opinion: “This is one to downloadTM” I think ;-)

Censored by the MAN!

Published on June 11, 2008 in Internet, Ranting, Technowhiiit and Teh Madness. 2 Comments

Here’s something strange and almost insulting: This page doesn’t show up on Microsoft’s much vaunted LIVE SEARCH. It doesn’t appear if you search for GreyKodiak, and it doesn’t appear if you search for anything on it either. Including the post I made about the 0845 number that kept phoning me.

Every other search engine I could think of produces this site at or near the top of the results for both those searches, but on MSN there’s not a thing.

Click these examples:

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=0845+330+6769&go=&form=QBLH

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=greykodiak&go=&form=QBRE

Meanwhile I’m going to write to my MSP about this one!