No such things as a free lunch

It's been a funny few weeks, I've sat down to blog a few times about things I found funny and thought would be entertaining but when I come to write it down I change my mind thinking it too whiny instead. My levity has suffered of late I think, with my words sounding more serious than I intend them at times so I've been a little more cautious. Don't worry, it won't last.


This one is a nit of a whiny one though and I make no bones about it! It's a dilemma you see - My staff manager wants to take me to lunch tomorrow but I'm not sure I can sit opposite him for longer than 10 minutes without telling him exactly what I think of him. On the other hand, he is buying. My two great loves of Food and Ranting caught up in an impossible battle. Will sitting next to a lying waste of blood and organs put me off my dinner? Or can I survive the day until he goes away for another 6 months?

Answers on a postcard.

German + Bank Manager = ?

A nightmare clad in pinstripes and bearing complicated over-charging right? Ruthless efficiency regarldess of consequences?

Apparently not, this is a story that even warmed my dessicated and bitter heart!

Rock,Paper, Scissors revisited

As we discussed a few weeks ago, new awesomeness in the field of Rock, Paper, Scissors adding new dimensions to the game has been discovered: http://www.umop.com/images/rps25_outcomes.jpg

However, for those losers among you that pine for the classic old skool version but find the very idea of performing the physical actions required for this high tension, extreme competion vomit inducing, fear not as a solution has been created for you! That's right, no more RSI, no more pesky decision making, no more psych-out strategies ruining your fun! Not with the all new electronic Rock, Paper, Scissors!.

Safari

Apple have launched their web browser for Windows. Now as much as I am cautious of Apple hype I have always heard good things about the browser, I tend to use 2 anyway - usually Firefox and IE7 - one with Sun Java turned on and one without.

Anyway, Safari. So far it's just been frustrating - you download Firefox and IE7 and the just sort of work. If you want Java on, you just go to the tools menu and click a little box. Safari doesn't have a tools menu and the first time I navigated to a screen running Java applets it hung for about 3 minutes. I still have no idea how to get it to run applets so I have gone back to Firefox. You can see where Microsoft have nicked things from Safari with IE7, but that doesn't bother me because it works and if it works I couldn't give a toss who made it. Unfortunately, right now Safari is very much like everything else Apple - it works really well on their hardware, with their OS but just 'kind of' works on anything else. Maybe Apple stuff only woks if your machine is pretty.

Comedy Stuff...

I don't normally do requests but 'Liv asked me to blog about this (I think she is sick of reading about my various plans for people I don't like :p)

As part of my phase 2 'Acknowledging the Existence of London' initiative I have been to a couple of comedy gigs of late. The first went to was Richard Herring's excellently delivered mental breakdown in his Menage a Un standup tour. A lot of the stuff won't be to everyone's taste, he is far from mainstream but he delivers his material so well it is hilarious. Whathe does particularly well in a lot of his stuff is to make a moutnain out of a molehill and vice versa. He thinks nothing of extoling the virtues of marrying Maxine Carr but stretches his displeasure at the French word for potatoe meaning 'Apple of the Earth' to about 20 minutes. I can't do his show justice here because i am not a professional reviewy person, you write things like 'Extoling the virtues of marrying Maxine Carr' and that doesn't sound at all funny, but it is in the context of the show. Just trust me it is very funny.

I also went to the Lyric at Hammersmith last night, barely making the the last train home at the end! the line up was pretty good but i was mainly there to see Richard Herring (compere), Robin Ince, Mitch Benn and Stewart Lee. Even though I had heard a lot of the stuff in his show, RH did a really good job as compere, a family kindly providing material by bringing their 12 year old son to the show and sitting him in the front row. 'You're going to learn some interesting new words today my boy'. Giving the 12 year old a bottle of beer before the interval and saying 'drink this, I'll be funnier in the 2nd half then'.

Robin Ince was pretty good though he was trying some new material I think, and it wasn't suited to a 10 minute slot. I am off to see him in Southampton on Wednesday which i am looking forward to, I'm not at all worried because I have heard some of his stuff on the radio before and he is a very witty man. Mitch Benn was his usual brilliant and loud self, I don't usually like musical comedians but he is without doubt the king of comedy songs. A strong opening with 'I may have to murder James Blunt' and a song about the life cycle of a Boy Band, he was an excellent choice to finish the first half with. Stewart Lee opened the Second half, which I thought was a shame, I think he should have come a bit later. He basically spent 10 minutes breaking down and analysing a comment passed by his mother about a Tom O'Connor joke. It's a lot funnier than it sounds. He was one of my favourite parts of the evening as I've not seen much of his stuff since This Morning with Richard Not Judy (when still partnered with Rich Herring).

There were other comedians there, some less funny than others. I really like A Murray when he isn't doing his Pub Landlord bit but he only doesn't do that when on panel games and the like, his stage show entirely consists of it and I'm finding it a bit tired. It's a shame because he is clearly talented and clever (the Landlord basically parodying the people who are probably his biggest fans) but he's kind of trapped doing this act at the moment. I hope breaks out of it and does some other stuff soon.

Russell Howard was fanatstic, seen him on panel shows etc. but never seen his standup stuff - well worth it, he fit a lot into 10 minutes and the whole house laughed throughout.



So that is my brief synopsis! For the one American who occasionally reads this - I apologise you won't know any of these people but don't worry as I doubt any Brits do either, these aren't really mainstream big name comics.

All in all it was an excellent benefit gig, bumped into someone I met at Richard Herring's gig on Good Friday who helps run the Comedy Bar in Hampshire, it's worth checking out the site and web-stalking her or her partner in crime to your heart's content (the gig on Wednesday is run by comedy bar). Sadly for me, and happily for her I couldn't stay for a drink at the end as I had to go get a train. I've left a lot of stuff out here but the important bits are in as far as I am concerned!

There - you've had a 'What I did' post, back to the unfounded, opinionated ranting.....

Webbyness

I am really really really going to try and get some webby stuff done this weekend I promise! Things have been moving, just in very small steps. I am going to try and get the bulk of my blog CSS out of the way tomorrow so I can concentrate on the awesome and inspired artwork that will adorn the site. I am off up to Hammersmith on Sunday so it's unlikely I will get anything done then, but hopefully by the end of the month we will actually see something!

It won't be anything worth looking at of course........hmmmmmm............maybe I could sell it to Endemol.........

Die Endemol, Die

Big Brother post, but don't worry I have successfully avoided it on the TV again by cunningly not watching TV. Except for the excellent You Can Choose Your Friends last night. Relievingly good especially as I bigged up Mr Rich yesterday.

Anyway I've been reading on the beeb how one of the vacuous pieces of human waste they get on these shows didn't think that the 'N' word was in anyway racially offensive. And people think I am being harsh when I suggest anyone on, or applying to be on Big Brother should be culled for the sake of the gene pool.

Anyway this is my favourite part of the article, some quote from media watch:

"This will certainly undermine the programme and more importantly, cause resentment. It's very unhelpful."

Yeah, Big Brother is so highbrow and well regarded as a quality piece of inspirational programming that anything like this will do its credibility serious harm.

Sir Joseph Bazalgette was responsible for the design and construction of the London Sewage system, essentially pumping all the shit out of our homes in 1865. 140 years later his great-great grandson Peter Bazalgette (CCO of Endemol) is responsible for pumping it back in again*.

*Pretty sure I nicked this, looks like a Stephen Fry one to me ;)

Shameless Plug...

Richard Herring's one-off comedy drama 'You Can Choose Your Friends' is on tonight and I think you should both watch it (I may be exaggerating my readership there...). I have no idea if it'll be awesome or not, what I do know is that Richard Herring is an incredibly funny and talented comedian who is long overdue being back on the telly-box. To be honest, Richard Herring could just stand there doing nothing on screen for an hour and half and it would be better than most things on ITV.

I'd like to say I am a massive fan of his, and it is strictly speaking true though I am reluctant to do so in case comedy is like football where you get accused of not being a real fan because you haven't stalked the object of your fandom throughout your entire life. I do have all of his DVDs that are currently on release and read his blog daily, but I only sort of 'rediscovered' him at the end of last year when I was watching some episodes of Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy on my PC. I'd heard him on the radio quite a bit, and found myself google stalking him, which is always good fun.

Anyway I marked the resumption of my 'acknowledging London exists' initiative and also a reunion with an old house mate (who is, despite his protestations to the contrary, a Rich herring stunt double) by going to the current Menage a Un stand up tour at the Arts Theatre.

Basically, I'm very pleased that one of the country's best comic talents is finally regaining recognition in his own right, a difficult thing to accomplish when you have historically and inevitably been compared to an equally talented stand-up who used to be your double-act partner. Maybe, one day in the future, scientists will create a critic who isn't a lazy waste of blood and organs, who'll actually notice that if you are part of a double act for the best part of 15 years not only is there a possibility that some small elements of you material may reflect some of your erstwhile partner's but some of his will reflect yours. maybe they'll even notice that despite this, it is delivered in completely different styles making comparisons stupid. I think it's very difficult for the barely simian hacks that write reviews to break away from the Gary Barlow view of life - there must be a Good one and a Bad one - for 2 elements of an act to be successful and talented is a concept their tiny conceited little hardwired brains can't cope with.

Awesome, there wasn't meant to be a rant here but my brain has cleverly sneaked one in, I'm so proud. I am going to stop now as I am writing this in Firefox for the first time in ages and it keeps trying to tell me to change my spellings to the incorrect and silly American ones. It also insists that my made up words aren't real. Stupid thing.

Watch the thing later, if you don't like it go then watch his show, if you still don't like him then clearly you are wrong. There is no other explanation so don't look for one.

London 2012 Logo........

This may come as a surprise to my regular 1.5 readers, but......... STOP BLOODY WHINING!

I mean seriously, is it really that bad? Compared to every other crap World Cup, Olympics etc logos that there have been over the years? Essentially an uproar over an inoffensive picture. Is it worth 400k? Certainly not, but then it's designed by marketing people, if evolution was left up to marketeers we'd all be sat in caves trying to work out if rocks are edible. Is it an awful logo? Very few logos aren't, get a bloody grip people! It's indicative of our attitude to things like this over here, I mean we only became interested in the Olympics when we found out the French wanted it..

I think I am paraphrasing someone here, but I can't remember who right now so apologies on the off chance you are reading! Basically the conversation with London goes something like this:

Olympics person: How would you like all the world's nations top athletes to travel thousands of miles, at the peak of their physical and mental fitness to compete in the greatest sporting competition the world has ever known, in the very city in which you live?!

Londoner: Where will we park?

Alternatively:

Olympics person: How would you like all the world's nations top athletes to travel thousands of miles, at the peak of their physical and mental fitness to compete in the greatest sporting competition the world has ever known, in the very city in which you live?!

Daily Mail: All those foreigners? that can run, and jump? We'll never be able to catch 'em to chuck them back out again!

Seriously, I am not a big follower of sports with the exception of Rugby League, and even that has slipped of late, but ever since there was a whiff London might win the bid there has been an almost unending drone of whining and 'why o why o why?!'. I am a big ranter and whiner, but I'm usually doing it for effect and cheap laughs rather than any real fervour. before the win it was all about how much money we were wasting on a doomed bid, then when it looked promising it was 'We have to beat the French!' (as opposed to 'We could get the Olympics!'). Almost immediately after teh bid was won, the complaints about cost started, and transport, and will we have enough tea, and what about immigration? and all the other bollox.

I complain about the Daily Mail because they deserve it, I complain about the government because they have become the conservative party I voted against. If the wheels DO actually fall off, I'll join in - until then just be quiet OK?*


*Corruption, bribes, spiraling costs don't count - it's part of any major sports package ;p

The last resort of a scoundrel...

Patriotism that is, according to Samuel Johnson anyway. I tend to disagree with such a silly statement, clearly Ambrose Bierce is much more accurate:

"In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.”

Apparently we they are proposing 'Britain Day'. On the plus side they are talking about making it a Bank Holiday, which would be cool but to be honest, they are much more likely to try and steal one of our weekends. This concept appears to have been developed by one of the Amazing Coma Twins, Ruth Kelly. She and her double act partner Patricia Hewitt tour the country demonstrating their ability to walk and talk whilst in a coma. I'm not sure how that qualifies them as cabinet ministers, but there you go.

I suspect that the day will consist mainly of flags. That and bigotry concealed beneath a barely visible veneer of tolerance - basically the Daily Mail in holiday format. In fact I imagine the Daily Mail will fully support the initiative as they are missing a Summer headline. I mean from November through December they lead with '[Muslims]* ruin Christmas'. In the run up to Easter - 'Muslims ruin Easter' and in the Autumn the 'Muslims ruin Halloween'. The problem they have is that 3-4 month bit in the middle that doesn't kind of run up to anything - they have to make do with stories about how anyone vaguely foreign looking has stolen all of our jobs, resulting in a child prodigy dying from starvation.

With a correctly positioned 'Britain Day' in that period, they could have a brand new headline 'Muslims ruin Britain Day'. I don't know how they come up with it I really don't!

*Of course 'Muslim' here can be replaced with any minority it is currently fashionable to persecute, such as Poles or any other eastern European.

Chicken Under Pressure...

I bought a big pressure cooker a few months ago. It's specific purpose, I'm sure you'll all remember, was for chili cooking. I wasn't interested in the pressure part of it at all, I just needed a large metal container to put vast quantities of meat, tomatoes and chilis in.

However, cooking chili in this kind of weather is silly, only an idiot would do that. So today I am cooking a nice hot chicken curry. Chicken you see? Much lighter than beef - a summer meal I'm sure you'll agree.

Anyway, I am making it in my chili pot (blasphemy!) only I've decided to see what the pressurey bit does and have dusted off the lid to my bucket-esque chili pot. I have taken photos of various stages of the cooking process, in case it explodes and I am found peppered with shrapnel and half cooked bits of curryfied chicken. Also I was a bit bored and my camera was just sort of sitting there, so... anyway I'll post them if there is any demand but they are incredibly dull so I doubt there will be. If there are any serious injuries sustained, I'll be sure and photo and post them for you though.

Where have you been Winston Smith.....?

The title of this BBC News Story is 'Stop And Quiz Powers Considered'. Now if it were the case that the police could randomly stop you in the street and quiz you on historical trivia or pop culture, I think I would quite like that. It could lead children to carry mini encylodpedias around with them in an effort to 'beat the fuzz'! (yeah, I'm down with the cool kidz lingo boiyyeezz!). Or more likely a PDA, what with all this moderness!

I'd really like it if I was accosted by an officer of the law only to be asked 'What's the capital of Bulgaria?' or 'Is Light a: a particle, b: a wave or c: both?'. It could make us all more smug and knowledgeable an pub quizzes up and down the land would become like University challenge. I'm not sure what the penalty would be for getting questions wrong though.... maybe a LoserBoard in the middle of everytown, with local, regional and national Thicko Rankings. At the end of every month the bottom 10 in each town could be pelted with stale Jaffa Cakes (which are a cake and NOT a biscuit!).

Alas, this Quiztopian future is not to be. The wonderful dream of laughing, crazed mobs of Triviaphiles ridiculing and assaulting those with better things to do with their time than learning the average length of the dorsal guiding feathers of a chaffinch will not come to pass. Instead it's an 'anti-terror method'.

This is the latest in a string of cunning plans by the government to track down and ensnare the wily, swarthy and evil musl......errrr....asi......errrm....terrorist, yeah thats it - evil evil terrorists. They eat babies you know? Apparently, simply by asking a person who looks a bit foreign where they've been you can catch them out. "Hello sir, where have you been today?", "Why I've been planting homedmade bombs at the local powerstation officer", "AHA! Got You!", "Curse you and your infidel tactics! We swarthy skinned cannibal savages have no chance against you ingenius white people!"

No, of course not. The erosion of civil liberties is always couched in the language of fear and a message of beneficence. "don't worry, it's not YOU we will use this against, it's people who you don't fully understand and so won't really care about. Mostly they have heavy accents and as you read the Daily Mail, you already know they aren't to be trusted - besides look at their swarthy skin and shifty eyes...."

I think discriminating based on a lack of useless knowledge is much fairer and at least we'd have a use for stale jaffa cakes..

Baby Ducking Stool

A response from Jo just reminded me I haven't posted since last week. So how did the baby dunking go? Bloody confusing that's how!

It was my Uncle's new baby Megan, born 3 months premature but now fattening up nicely thankyou very much. She seemed to behave herself and barely gurgled throughout the proceedings. The ceremony itself was quite dull and disappointing, not having attended one of these things before I was hoping that as it is something of a happy afair their maybe some fun in the ceremony. There wasn't - the priest just banged on about God (someone we have disproven on this very blog!) and applied various product to the baby.

Now if it was me, there would be a little see-saw kind of system to put the baby on, the Vicar's job would be simply to count down '3-2-1!...' then the congregation shout 'DUNK THE BABY!' and cheer as the child is briefly drenched. Much more enjoyable I am sure you'll all agree.

Anyway, I digress. Confusing. My Uncle's daughter. Only apparently he isn't my Uncle but my cousin because although my aunt is his mother, he was adopted by my Nain and Taid and brought up as my Mum's brother. Thus unofficially making him my Uncle, actually my cousin and therefore Megan-Ann is my 2nd cousin and not my first cousin as would be the case if my Uncle was actually my Uncle and not my cousin.

or something. Good weekend though, caught up with a lot of people and drank inadvisable amounts of booze and watched some very bad Rat based horror movie. Ooooh it was good.

Trains, Big Brother, Training Wheels

I travelled back to wales yesterday, I have a Christening to go to on Sunday and various other events to celebrate, my 30th and my Mum's birthday included.

Most people have the good sense not to invite me to Christenings or Weddings, with the only church related activity I've had to endure being funerals. This is my Mum's brother though, and I've yet to meet his new wife so I kind of had to make the effort. So long as the Lord can refrain from smiting me in his House whilst the baby dunking is going on all will be well.

Anyway, it took a little over 2 hours to get from my flat to Euston, probably a distance of 23 miles. It took a little less time to get from Euston to Chester, a distance of 192 miles. That sentence was just to add justification for buying a car later in the year - moving on.
I took my seat at Euston and my standard train experience looked like it was about to begin. The seat next to mine was reserved, a small 1-2 year old child was in the seat immediately to my front and the train was filling up.

Now under normal circumstances this means that the moment the journey begins, the child will attempt the world's longest, loudest and most irritating scream-a-thon whilst the mother looks on tsking and attempting to placate the child with some technique she thinks she saw once on some crappy reality show. The reserved seat would be occupied by someone of questionable personal hygiene who either:

1) Has an intensely boring hobby that he feels must be shared with the world. Collecting Word Fonts, eyebrow classification, window frame spotting - things of this nature.

2) Just got released from prison.

3) Sleeps, snores, drools.

4) You're not sure what's wrong but you have a feeling he used to dissect things as a child to 'see how they worked'.

5) All of the above.

I was ready. I had my Zune, my DS, a book, my phone and a set of headphones.

None of which I needed. The child gurgled and played the whole journey without whining once, my would be murderous, boring cannibal failed to show and I had a pleasant and uneventful journey. Even the normal contingent of shambolic mutants that board at Crewe were relatively non-repulsive.

I did notice one man, he was in a seat in the opposite row of seats. For the first hour of the Euston-Chester journey he had a Sat Nav device out, which he was staring intently at. Now I was fairly sure that the driver of the train, no matter how unskilled, was unlikely to take a wrong turn and end up in a field in Sussex. This guy clearly thought otherwise. After an hour he put the thing away, I assume because it was a the treacherous Southeast - Midlands section of the journey that most concerned him. He didn't get up to tell the driver that he had stopped monitoring his progress, so either he was some kind of unofficial person or (I think you'll agree that this is more likely), he was just satisfied to let him carry on on his own, much like when your dad is pushing you on your first bike and he lets you go without telling you.

At the end of the journey I imagine the young, fresh-faced train driver approached SatNavMan and said 'So SatNavMan (this is probably a title rather than his actual name)...how did I do?'

SNM: 'I don't know, I stopped monitoring after Warwick son, after Warwick......you were on your own'

A tear in both their eyes.

Dad picked me up from Chester, he'd learned a new joke since my last visit. I'll post some pics on facebook if the weather picks up and I can get up the mountain.

Wooooo! Go 'Phins!

Pedro Ramirez - International Latin Lover, AKA Pedr, Pedro, Pete, Piotr (he doesn't know that he has a Russian Mafia alias yet) and Pedwar has secured his position as a God amongst insects. He has secured 2 tickets to Wembley stadium for the Miami Dolphins/NY Giants NFL game in October. We're likely to get altitude sickness, but we are going.

This makes him better than you, I'm sorry but you'll just have to come to terms with it He reliably informs me that I like the Dolphins more than the Giants because of Eli Manning. Yeah, I hate him! grrrr! I am willing to accept other votes from Steelers fans, but no one else!

I know most Brits reading this will likely berate the game, but thanks to Pietro's relentless years of brainwashing I can appreciate the game (or at least the bits of it I understand). He did fail to make me a niners fan though, instead I infuriated him by randomly picking the Steelers as my team only to have them win the Superbowl the following year.

I will never get baseball, I'm sorry Pedr but you're wrong - it's rounders with tight pants.

What the Hell Just Happened?!

Here's the story. Basically, much like Lord Goldsmith is Tony's pet lawyer, delivering an interpretation of the law based on what Tony interprets it as - i.e differently to everyone else in the world, Alberto Gonzales does the same for President Exxon.

For those of you who don't know this story, the run down is that 8 US Attorneys got sacked for not being loyal Bushies - sacked for political rather than practical reasons.

Al tried several strategies to get out of admitting responsibility. Firstly there was the Bart Simpson Defence : 'I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, no-one can prove anything'. This didn't work because diary entries, meetings and emails proved he was aware of something going on.

Secondly was the classic Teflon Shoulders approach. This is where any responsibility or decisions making immediately slides off onto those below, resulting in the 'I didn't make any decisions to do with this' defence. Also proven false by the same emails etc. as before.

Thirdly was the Coma defence. This is where Al, bless his heart, fails to remember anything before the current date. In his defence, he didn't act all surprised byt shouting 'It's 2007?! What is the internet?! Who Am I??!', but he did say words to the effect of 'I have no recollection of that' 71 times during a hearing over the matter. Somebody needs to take some Omega-3 supplements.

Finally they have settled on the Goodyear Blimp approach. This isn't a defence as such, more of a scapegoating/distraction from events - 'Look over there! He's resigning! It must be his fault!'.

However, everyone knows that Gonzales is a vacuous waste of blood and organs who thinks torture is OK, and the right to Habeas Corpus doesn't exist in the US. I did put a whole bit here about America isn't a democracy at all (or Britain) but it was very long and boring and this was meant to be a lighthearted look at a travesty and a pathetic little man. However, I've been in work since a little before 6am and now I'm slightly depressed.

The fun, such as it is, will return later I promise!

Because Rock, Paper, Scissors might be considered too cool.....

t1m3 2 l33t |_|p th4t g4m3 n00b!



That's right folks, RPS has been Geek_Pimped!

[Paddy_Edit]Apparently Rob linked to this a week or so ago and I am naught but a filthy plagiariser![/Paddy_Edit]

Sunday Excuses

It's very dull and miserable outside today, and despite what you may think - this is a good thing. It's good for a variety of reasons but mainly my Sunday Excuses.

If it was sunny and pleasant outside I would spend the day doing exactly what I am doing, only feeling guilty about it because I should be outside hiking or something. Rich Lowe, who visited on Friday, hasn't helped matters by buying me a book caled '132 seize the days', it's full of things to do at weekends and Bank Holidays. Lonely Planet is entirely staffed by those really annoying people, you know the ones - where every single item they own was given to them by some villager, or goat herd or vegetarian cannibal in the jungles of Peru.

I'm joking of course, there are a couple of good things in it that I might give ago and it was a thoughtful present. I'm right about the Lonely Planet people though.

So anyway, normally I would feel guilty about staying in and doing not much, which is where the second layer of facade comes in. 'I'm working on my website'. Roughly translated this is 'I have my editor open, and I'm buggering about with margins whilst not achieving anything'.

I have a new reason today, Emi is working hard to complete her dissertation so I am nominally staying in 'working on my website' in moral support. The differnce is that she awesome, good at what she is doing and general aceness on toast. I on the other hand, will maybe draw a few stick men.


Hmmm, the sun is trying to come out. devious sod.

Tales from the Crypt

I turned 30 last Sunday and I am feeling surprisingly spritely. I think you'll agree that there are only a handful of plausible explanations for my apparent good health:

Reason 1: Inspired by my grasp of fingerpaints, my parents decided I was a child prodigy but they realised that the school (run by The Man, cunningly disguised as Mrs Jones) would not accept one so young. They forged my records and claimed I am older than I am. Once they realised their error in judgement regarding my cognitive ability, it was too late to rectify the situation.

This would place me at least a year younger than my published age of 30 and also explain my poor choices in secondary school. It all fits.....

Reason 2: Aliens.

No explanation required....it all fits....

Reason 3: It's entirely possible Mephistopholes was around on Saturday during the celebrations and, at a loose end, bargained for my immortal soul, granting me extra time before my spiral into the clutches of Death.

If this is the case, he kind of loses because I am already dead inside. Of course, that in itself may be the result of another contract I signed in a similar drunken stupor with another Infernal bargain-hunter. If this is the case then I could get a few more years just out of the legal wrangling alone. This would make me a genius (see 1) and also it all fits.........

Reason 4: I have mastery over time. Evidence? All my favourite things from the 80s are cool again!

Granted my mastery looks like it only extends to what I deem cool, seems incapable of bringing back my flat stomach and also has brought back pastel yellow as a fashion choice for men. Every power has it's limits, so this .....all fits.



Me after my birthday celebrations, I'm told you can't see any wrinkles or grey hairs...

Gaffa Tape - a million and one uses

As the Facebook group rightly says 'If you can't fix it with Gaffa tape, you haven't used enough'.