Spent the day entertaining The Missus’ grandmother who is another year older. Hurrah! The day was good fun, though it was blighted by heavy traffic travelling to and from her house. We tried a local Toby Carvery in Buckhurst Hill and grandmother enjoyed the food muchly. I’m not a carvery kind of guy, preferring not to line up at the trough like a rutting piglet, but to have my food delivered to my table. It’s the dignified and cultured way of behaving, no? (I jest – I just don’t like carvery food. It just seems nasty and plain to the palate for me) So I ended up settling for a Turkey Cesar Salad, which was a huge mound of food. I couldn’t complain about the size of the portion but the turkey was a little non-descript and wet. But I took solace with the garlic croutons and my pint of cider. Desert was a slice chocolate cake with ice cream. What an interesting combination that all made with my booze. Hmmm…
Not much else to report really other than I totally failed to fix grandmother’s TV. It’s a pile of knackered shit which should never have left the Ferguson factory. Hopefully the Missus will be able to get the local Currys electrical shop to repair/replace/refund the TV.
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This is about an intelligent beermat that can tell whether or not you want a refill and will alert the barman. Not bad, but it would be better if the beermat could tell when you’ve had enough and phoned for a taxi. Now that would be useful!
BBC NEWS | Technology | Hi-tech beermats for 21st Century
Not sure who did this, but this trailer is brilliant and the person deserves kudos. Imagine an alternative reality where a very famous horror film has been reimagined as the ultimate tear jerker. Here’s the trailer to “Shining”.
Well it made me smile. 🙂
Oh dear. The lemon harvest this year was a little poor. Our tree yielded one tiny little fruit (make your own jokes) and it dropped off the day after The Missus administered the usual dose of Baby Bio plant food. Anyway, here is the lemon in the palm of my hand. If you want the lemon, drop me a line and I’ll send it to you. Remember, lemons have pips and you could use this fruit to grow a little lemon tree just like mine!
Yesterday I was very happy. The Missus took my favourite watch to the watch repairer to get a replacement battery. Now this watch has been sitting in the draw for about six years waiting for this day. Every so often, I would remember that my watch was without battery and ask The Missus to take it into town. Usually, the staff of the local jewellers couldn’t get the back off the watch and so it remained batteryless. Yesterday, by coincidence, a little old fellow who did all the watch repairs for the aforementioned jeweller’s shop actually came into the shop while the staff were grunting and groaning to get the back off my watch. He had the tools to open the watch and now it has a battery. It is a Citizen Promaster WR-100 watch, which I bought in 1995. It is the best watch in the world and if I adjust the dial, it tells me how much fuel I have left…yes, this is a pilot’s watch. (No – I didn’t steal it from a pilot. I bought it, dummy).
I now feel complete!
In the post: King Crimson – Live in Brighton. Oh dear. The sound quality is really bad on this one. Buying records from the DGM store and the King Crimson Collectors’ Club is a bit like visiting Thailand and sleeping with a ladyboy. You do it because you have to find out what it is like. So every couple of months, I spunk my money up the wall buying these CDs just to see what they are like. I end up feeling cheated and dirty and abused…but I’ll keep going back for more. Yup – just like sleeping with a ladyboy. 🙂
On unrelated news, my mother announced proudly that she only has 42% of her lung function working properly. She informed me of this while taking a long drag on a cigarette. Yup, I’ve had the arguments about smoking, but she won’t listen. However, she still moans at me whenever she sees me a little tipsy. “Ooooh, you shouldn’t drink so much.” The great thing about drinking is that your body tells you when you’ve had enough. You generally fall over. With smoking, there’s no warning until the pathologist is slopping your diseased lungs into a kidney dish. Remember kids, smoking is neither big nor clever. However, drinking in moderation is fun. Whoops! That’s the completely wrong message to give out, isn’t it?
Oh bollocks. Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t fuck, don’t eat red meat, don’t lust after teenage girls, don’t scratch your nuts in the morning, don’t have that biscuit with your tea. Don’t do anything you enjoy because it will all kill you in the end and some know-it-all will come along at your funeral and say “Well he could have lived much longer if he hadn’t enjoyed himself so much!”. Just get in the coffin now you celibate, tea-totalling vegetarian. How’s dat for a public information message?
OK – here’s something for all you musos out there. On my Internet travels, I came across the music website CCMixter. The interesting this about this site is it allows you to upload your tunes and let other folks mess around with them to produce different and hopefully, more interesting, tunes. I thought I’d have a go at this with one of my songs called “Twelve”. You can download the bare tracks from my page on CCMixter here: http://ccmixter.org/media/people/vrooom
For those of you wanting to hear the original track, here it is:
Or you can download that to your PC from here. (Just right-click the link and select “Save As” from the menu)
On unrelated matters, Alex the Wonderdog attended the vets today to get his booster. This means he can sniff and lick piss to his heart’s content without catching any serious canine problems. Just keep that tongue away from me, you dirty little bugger! 🙂
I love gadgets. Yeah, I love gadgets and gizmos a lot. I was employed once solely because of my fanaticism to gadgets and gizmos. Oh, the glory days…but I digress. I’ve been enjoyed the Sony PSP since I got mine in the US in May, but one of the shortcomings is battery life. You have to keep recharging the thing. This isn’t a problem in itself, but when I saw this solar charger from Logic 3, I just had to give it a go. The unit itself is made from shiny black plastic and opens up to reveal two solar panels. These are to be exposed to the light and recharge the inbuilt LI-ON battery inside the unit. It should take around 8 hours to charge it in good light and then you can use the charget to either charge up your PSP or use it as an external battery/power source. This is great if you are travelling and aren’t near a power supply. I’ve been using it for a day now and I am impressed. I can keep my PSP topped up or I can run it from the Solar Charger. How cool is that? However it does take an awful long time to charge via the solar panels (but that’s living in England at this time of year) but you can use the PSP’s charger to boost power levels – though this defeats the whole point of the solar charger. So it’s a good idea, but it is let down by the lack of sunshine at the moment! 🙂
The Logic 3 Solar Charger
It cost me a reasonable £23 from Simplygames.com and you can read more about this handy device here.
If I were to give this a rating, I would give it a healthy **** out of ***** (That’s 4 out of 5 stars, purely for effort) 😉
I like movies and one of my favourites is the classic “The Wicker Man”. I remember seeing it the very first time and being completely shocked and horrified by the ending. It’s an amazing feat of filmaking that you DON’T guess the ending until it is all too late. Anyway, they are remaking this classic and moving the characters from a remote Scottish isle to the American mid-West. Christopher Lee is being replaced by Ellen Burstyn and Nick Cage is taking on the guise of Edward Woodward. Like all “re-imagings” that have gone before, it sounds horrid and director Neil La Bute should be taken outside and sacrificed inside a huge flaming Wicker Cock as penance for his crimes. Only kidding!
Anyway, here are some snaps from the film set. It’s going to go down as well as the US versions of “Get Carter” and “The Italian Job”, I tells ya!