OH MY GOD! I’m LIKE totally sick of LIKE people who keep LIKE saying LIKE between every other word, and who LIKE keep starting and ending every statement by saying they were LIKE, “OH MY GOD,” LIKE.
I’m fairly I’m not the only one either…
Tag Archive for 'fools'
Through the course of today I’ve begun to wish that sunburn was instantly fatal. You may think that’s a somewhat odd statement, or perhaps an odd wish to have, but I do have a reason that extends beyond my usual brand of misanthropic super-villainy.
A bit of background is in order first I think.
You may have noticed that Scotland is suddenly in the throes of a miniature heatwave which appeared out of nowhere last week and proceeded to slow bake the whole country over the course of the last few days. It was particularly warm over the weekend with temperatures that rarely occur at this time in May. Many rejoiced and decided to spend the day lying around like dying slugs in the middle of the park, but many more took cover inside and cursed the shiny burning thing in the sky.
I of course was in the second camp as I really, really do not do well in the heat. I can’t sleep, I lose my appetite and I sweat like I’m lost in the Sahara at the slightest exertion. I wasn’t designed to deal with anything much above 22°C and anything about 26°C reduces me to lying on the laminate flooring mumbling incoherently. I am a Scotsman, with a good deal of Scandinavian and Irish ancestry thrown in, and I’m smart enough to admit that i don’t have the genetic predisposition needed to tolerate more than two hours of sunshine a day. Sadly much of the rest of Glasgow’s population don’t seem to be either willing, or able, to make a similarly logical acknowledgement of the limitations of their pasty, scrawny bodies and seem determined to get a “Pure Great Tan” at any cost.
What I have noticed, although it probably ranks up there with Phrenology as a scientific theory, is that the amount of sunburn seems to be inversely proportional to the intelligence of the subject. I’ve yet to see any of the smarter employees at The Work with sunburn, but all the halfwits that should be stacking shelves in Asda are all red as lobsters. What amuses me even more about these idiot lobster people is that instead of learning to cover up their pasty white flesh from further damage they, to a man, are wearing clothes that expose even more of their flesh to the sun’s unblinking gaze. Indeed they all seem fairly proud of their excessive sunburn and the odd tan-lines that it has etched across their skin.
I’ll admit that I’ve never been able to see the attraction in sunbathing. I can’t for the life of me understand why people pay to travel to exotic holiday destinations, and then spend their entire time lying around a pool with a bunch of like minded fools. However if sunburn was fatal then it’s likely I would never have to listen to another story about how some halfwit went to Greece/Turkey/Egypt/Delete As Appropriate* and sat around for two weeks soaking up the sunshine instead of investigating the local history and culture.
Might cut down on the number of oxygen thieving goons in the world at the same time.
I know it’s probably an odd thing to be annoyed by, but I’ve recently taken umbrage at the number of emails I get where people have clearly went onto part of the lolcats website, clicked save as on a few images, and then emailed them out to all their friends with some pithy comment added to each one.
Sure the pictures are invariably funny, and I do appreciate the fine works done by the contributors to icanhascheezburger.com, failblog and all their friends, but I don’t need some sad-sack emailing me reruns of pictures I saw weeks, months or even years ago. You didn’t make this, you have no claim on this, I can even see the site’s URL at the bottom. I have the constant urge to reply to their emails with, “YOU’VE BROKEN THE INTERNET!”, but I know all that will happen is I’ll get a confused phone call from IT asking me if my internet is broken.
Invariably by the time it gets to me it’s been forwarded so much the subject line looks like someone trying to write down the lyrics to one of Scatman John’s early hits. “FW: RE: FW: FW: ad infinitum”. The references in the pithy comments are lost to me because they are about people, places and things that I know nothing about. Worse still the people who resend and forward the mail rarely take the time to remove their automatic signatures from the thing leaving a huge ugly mess of warnings about the legality of the email, virus scanning and whither or not the sender’s company endorses the contents that continues to grow in size until it exceeds War and Peace in word count.
That’s bad enough of course, but then there’s the indentation and “>” arrows applied to all those earlier emails by the sender’s mail client.
> so you get
>> pages and pages
>>> and page and pages
>>>> and even more pages and pages
>>>>> of text increasingly squashed to the side
>>>>>> of the screen where it
>>>>>>> rapidly becomes annoyingly unreadable
On top of this they usually save the images in the largest possible format so that as soon as the damn thing arrives I start getting automatic pop ups from the server complaining about the size of my inbox.
The worse, absolute god damn, thing about the whole funny email things is how much it resembles the common cold. I’ve actually watched as funny emails spread like a virus around the huge open plan office I work in. It usually arrives up the back, with the two middle aged ladies that guard the printer supplies like ogres, and from then it spreads to their selected few. It’s really quite elegant how it distributes itself from a single point outwards like a supernatural shock-wave of cute kitties and folk falling over. Fine, you might think, eventually everyone gets the email and you have a laugh and it goes in the bin. Yeah, that’s what you might think, but really what happens is somebody is out the day it’s sent, or they’re on holiday, or in meetings, and they don’t get to see the email till later. Then they forward it, and off it goes again like an aftershock flying around the place. Even if everyone’s in, and this doesn’t happen right away, it’s almost guaranteed that in a month or so someone will either receive the email again from outside, or they’ll find it in their email archive and forward it to their pals. Either way the vicious, endless cycle will begin anew sooner or later.
Please, by all means, continue to send me funny stuff, interesting stuff and even the odd lolcat, but please, for the sake ofthe children, stop trying to do the lolcat site’s job for them.
I know that sunshine is a rare thing in the West of Scotland, but is it really so rare that it causes half of the population to develop a Deadly Brain Cloud? Take yesterday for example: It was sunny, warm and generally fairly present. There was a strong breeze from the south-west that kept the air moving, enough to stop the air becoming stifling, but not strong enough to ruin the good weather.
A fairly perfect spring day in other words.
I was enjoying my ride home on the bike, same as most days, when I became concious that a lot of strange things seemed to be happening.Glasgow suddenly seemed to become infested with stunt drivers, addle-brained pedestrians and crazed dogs.
It started up on Bilsland Drive in Ruchill. I tend to head along it towards the west end so that I can avoid the bus laden nightmare of the city centre. Bilsland Drive is a big wide street with only a few houses on the one side and the tumbledown remains of the old Ruchill Hospital on the other. There’s more than enough room for two lanes of traffic on either side provided there’s no parked cars. It’s one of those streets in Glasgow that makes it great to cycle along because you know that with all that room nobody is going to try to squeeze past the end of your handlebar at 30mph.
Or so I thought.
I had just passed the gates of the old hospital. Pedalling along, minding my own business, when out of the blue a Toyota Yaris passed me within inches, in spite of there being plenty of room. Then, to my open mouthed amazement, the damn thing pulled in to the kerb right in front of me.
BRAKES = ON.
I scowled at the occupant, but gave her the benefit of the doubt: Maybe she hadn’t judged the distance properly and it was an honest mistake. I made to go round her car, and my front wheel was just about level with the back of the car when she threw the driver’s door open and leapt out.
“Fucking hell,” I said and swerved to avoid suffering head on collision with the Hambeast.
She looked at me, clearly registered I was there, and then turned to commence digging stuff out of her car. Why do people who do this exact thing never seem to get hit by passing trucks?
She was bad enough, but I also got chased along part of Queen Margaret Drive by a demented dog who’s owner just watched as it ran down the road behind me and in front of a taxi. I nearly ran over a woman who, despite clearly seeing me approaching along the road, decided to step out in front of me at the last possible moment causing me to swerve violently to avoid her.
After that I was more cautious. I indicated with hand signals in plenty of time, and kept a wary eye on pedestrians and wildlife. That still didn’t help me avoid a group of students wandering down the middle of the road on a blind bend, or the old man in the car who did a U-Turn right in front of me, or the bus that crawled along behind me even though there was enough space to pass.
Now I’ve given due consideration to the possibility that I had wandered into the twilight zone, or that I just suffered a run of bad luck, but thinking back I’m almost certain that this kind of madness always occurs when it’s warm. I guarantee that it’ll be better today if the weather stays colder.
Meanwhile if the residents of Glasgow could try to keep themselves hydrated, wear sunscreen and keep a wee bit of common sense and situational awareness it would be greatly appreciated.
If only so I don’t have to pick bits off you off my tires.
I’m abjectly tired of office work. It feels like a thankless never-ending cycle of drudgery for with little or no chance of personal fulfilment. This afternoon I’ve spent three and a half hours going through an ancient Microsoft Access 97 database manually changing a single field in hundreds of records from “Valid – To Be Charged” to “Valid – Closed”. Why was I doing it manually? Because nobody knows the password to open up the database in design mode so I can create a query to automate the process. Why don’t they know the password?
Simple: The guy who built it left in 2004 and never told anyone what it was.
In the past I’ve considered setting myself up in business building custom computers, but that seems to be a ten-a-penny business nowadays. The vast majority of people that want custom built PCS are also the kind of people that wouldn’t let anyone else interfere in the construction of the machine.
I’ve taken an odd notion recently about quitting my job and setting myself up as a craftsman of some kind. Logically it’s probably not a good idea as I don’t have any manual craft skills. I made a pencil case and a roasting fork in Tech Studies at the school, but that was nearly twenty years ago.
Regardless of my lack of skills I do have a healthy dose of arrogant overconfidence in my own abilities, and a layman’s inclination to believe that, “that doesn’t look so hard.” Strangely I’ve been giving some cursory thought to the idea of quitting my day job and setting myself up as a purveyor of hand made furniture . I’ve had this sort of rustic idea of creating simple, utilitarian tables, chair and things out of decent quality wood and selling them on the internet.
Now practically speaking I don’t have the skills to make masterful pieces of furniture from scratch, and even if I could there’s no guarantee that people would buy them instead of some fifty quid mass produced effort from Ikea. In my dreams though, my idle daydreams that sustain me when the excel spreadsheets are sucking out my soul, I can be free to work at my own pace; creating wonderful things.
So Earth Hour came and went, and I turned off my house lights and non-essential electrical appliances just like the hippies wanted. It’s no skin off my nose. I was playing Assassin’s Creed 2 on my PC at the time and didn’t need the lights on anyway. Hey don’t look at me like that: to me a PC is an essential appliance.
I can’t say I’m all that amused by Earth Hour. Sure some hip young things across the globe might think it’s a good idea to turn off their electric for an hour or so, and maybe for every one of them that turned their lights out, another five people were busy watching CSI on Channel Five. The street lights still blazed on across the world, the wheels of industry still turned and when the lights went back on the world was still the same.
Critics say the effect of earth hour is negligible. That the net effect across the entire world is virtually the equivalent of putting half a dozen cars of f the road for one year. Give me a sledgehammer and immunity from prosecution and I’m sure I could do twice that in an hour.
The organisers say that the net effect isn’t the point. They say the point is to raise awareness off climate change and to point out that everyone can make a difference. The trouble is that the people behind this are assuming that people naturally want to help save the world. That they are as idealistic, and perhaps optimistic, as they are. They believe that a grand demonstration, such as Earth Hour, will be enough to get people seriously thinking about how they can impact on climate change.
I believe they’re deluded.
They’re deluded because they’ve made an assumption that human beings are proactive and altruistic, but if we’re approaching this realistically, and honestly, we must first admit that humans are selfish, self serving bastards of the highest order. I don’t blame humans for that though. It’s what dragged us from the swirling soup of single celled organisms to the lofty heights of space travel, quantum mechanics, representational democracy and the X-Factor.
Our very nature, and the nature of all life, is to reproduce, multiply and expand for as long as there are resources to sustain us. We didn’t make it to the top of the food chain by helping out strangers, avoiding using resources or acting in moderation. We slaughtered, burned and fought tooth and nail for our place in the world, and that struggle for survival is still deeply ingrained in us. We won’t turn out the lights because we expect that others will do it. We, each individually, need our light to be on, because we need that light no matter what effect having it on may have on future generations.
How many times have you gotten in the car and thought about how every trip, long or short, could be poisoning the air, the ground and the seas for future generations. I bet you didn’t give it a minutes thought as you turned the ignition. The only thing on your mind was where you were headed, and what you were going to do when you got there.
This is why I believe that Earth Hour will never have the effect that they imagine. The vast majority of people don’t see it as a serious attempt at education. They see it as a novelty, a grand spectacle. They turn off their lights for an hour, and the world looks funny on the pictures from space, but they haven’t learned anything. When the hour is up their light goes back on, and life goes on, as though nothing has changed.
Because it hasn’t.
I’ve been saying for a long time now that history is losing its importance in the modern world. People have no need to learn about, or respect the actions of people that don’t appear on reality TV shows.
A case in point is the announcement today by the Polish authorities that someone has deliberately stolen the infamous sign Arbeit Macht Frei that has hung over the main gate of Auschwitz Death Camp since it was built by the Nazis.
In my opinion this is nothing but a blatant disregard for what is a powerful memorial to remind the world of the systematic, industrial scale evil of the Nazi regime. I can’t conceive of any good reason why anyone would want to take the sign, but I suppose holocaust deniers are too obvious a target.
This may be a high profile incident, but it seems to be part of a worrying trend. It’s only a few weeks since a student narrowly avoided a jail sentence for urinating on a war memorial. It seems like the memory of the estimated sixty million people who died in World War II is already fading away. Young people, especially those under twenty at the moment, seem to have little understanding of historically important events. Now I know, and freely admit that I have a degree in history and am therefore probably quite biased about the whole thing, but even those without my historical leanings have to admit that there’s an ongoing dumbing down of society.
I think it has a lot to do with the mentality of current generations, and by that I mean anyone not of my generation. Many of them, from the earliest age, seem unable to look beyond themselves, and most seem highly ignorant of anything that doesn’t include an opportunity for text voting.
I know of course that many of today’s kids are good people. They know a bit about history, and they’re as outraged as I am by the fading values of western society, but they’re quietly hiding out there waiting for things to get better, and all the time the lunatics are gradually taking over the asylum.
Get it sorted kids, and stop waiting for us adults to sort them out.
The Work seems to be suffering from a case of internet flakey-shakey-connection-itis lately, which wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that much of my job revolves around two web apps. Honestly though that’s not a problem either as it’s left me plenty of time to float about reading Armageddon by Max Hastings while getting paid for it. The Work’s front line IT has been outsourced to a call centre in Portugal which tends to remote desktop first and asks questions later. The end result is that the majority of people in the office can’t get onto the internet. The retards across the hall are in a serious flap because they can’t get on the Hello Magazine site, or check up the latest shoe prices on Ebay.
All in all this would be a fine winter’s day if it wasn’t for one, single solitary fly in the ointment, and that fly is the phrase “the internet is down”.
No, you cretins, the internet is not down. The internet does not go down. The express, designed purpose of the internet is NOT TO GO DOWN. The internet was designed to maintain interconnectivity in the face of a nuclear war it doesn’t choke because you’ve looked up too many pairs of Prada shoes.
Though I might.
Once again I find myself sitting here with an incredulous look on my face and shaking my head in disdainful wonder at the so called “Great British Public”.
The BBC news has an article today that details a list of fifty unsung British heroes that the National Lottery has assembled as part of its 15th anniversary celebrations. You can see the full list here, but I’ll try to limit myself to a short rant on the contents of the top ten:
1: Michael Faraday, physicist
2: JM Barrie, author
3: Edward Jenner, smallpox vaccine pioneer
4: John Peel, broadcaster
5: Alan Turing, mathematician
6: Baldrick, Blackadder character
7: Midge Ure, singer
8: Percy Shaw, cat’s eyes inventor
9: Tim Berners-Lee, worldwide web inventor
10: Fred Scott, BBC cameraman
Admittedly some of the people in the top ten are underappreciated for their contributions to science, arts and society in general. Others though I would say are very well known, and some, well some shouldn’t even be on a list of people who are supposedly “heroes”.
Apologies to people of a nervous disposition, but I have to get something out of my system before I continue.
BALDRICK is a fictional character you FUCKING CRETINS!
Sorry about that.
The rest of the list is a strange mixture. As I’ve said I agree that many of the people mentioned on the list are deeply underappreciated by the public. The news was recently filled with the demand that the British Government apologise for basically hounding Alan Turing to suicide after the Second World War. His contribution to the fledgling art of computing and cryptanalysis during the war cannot be overstated and I believe he rightly belongs near the top of the list.
Midge Ure however is a world famous musician and responsible for a good chunk of the organisation of Band Aid, and the Band Aid Trust charity. I don’t see why was he chosen over the heads of other worthies such as Sting, Fish or even, dare I say it, Bob Geldof who was the more visible partner in Band Aid. I suppose at least Midge managed to do more than spend his life riding along on a one hit wonder band and thumping tables at charity gigs.
Another odd entry is Fred Scott the BBC cameraman at number ten. He’s the award winning cameraman who was filming when John Simpson and his Iraqi translator Kamaran Abdurrazaq Muhamed were caught in a friendly fire incident during the Iraq war. Kamaran was unfortunately killed when a US warplane bombed the convoy of Kurdish vehicles they were travelling in. Simpson was left deaf in one ear as a result. It was an important moment in the media coverage of warfare. I wouldn’t go as far as to rank Fred as high as 10 on this list, but I wouldn’t do him the dishonour of ranking him lower than FUCKING BALDRICK.
The more I read this list the more I begin to wonder if the people who voted for it were even aware of whom many of these people were. To me it reads like a list of people that young, trendy eighteen to twenty-four year olds have vaguely heard about from various sources and they picked them out of the hat. The inclusion of people like Stephen Merchant who co-wrote The Office seems like it was thrown in by some insane fan and the inclusion of the FICTIONAL CHARACTER of Jeeves the butler from the Jeeves and Wooster short stories strains credibility. Why not replace Jeeves with P.G Wodehouse himself? He’s not exactly well known now as he was when he started publishing stories.
I’m going to lie down in a dark room before I decide to go all Dr. Evil and try to put end to this farce we call society once and for all.
It’s been a few weeks since McDowall coined the term flaptask and, like I said, I’ve been trying to promote it’s use at The Work. As a large company full of management types that are clearly out of their depth most of the time there’s been many opportunities for me to drop the word flaptask and other related terms like flapbeast, flashflap, flapspam and flaptrap into polite office discussions. The related terms haven’t really taken off to any great degree, but we did have a giant running game of trying to create new ones over the course of a day or so.
That was a couple of weeks ago though, and I’d all but forgotten about the whole thing when out of the blue I heard someone in the canteen complaining about a flaptask that his manager had come up with. Thing is the guy in question has nothing to do with my team, and I’ve never actually seen him before or since.
The implications of this are clear: The flaptasks are spreading…