10/31/2002

Security Questions :  "Hello, is that Mr. Malibu?"
"Yes."
"Hi I'm calling from MBNA about your credit card. Do you have a few moments to discuss it right now?"
"Yeah, sure."
"Before we proceed, I'd just like to ask you a few security questions to confirm your identity."
"OK."
"Could you give me your date of birth and mother's maiden name?"
"Yes, I could. But first, can I ask you a few security questions to confirm your identity?"
"Er, well....."
"You know, how do I know that you're not some spotty teenager who has guessed my phone number, and that I have an MBNA card, and wants to get at my account and buy lots of herbal high over the internet?"
"Well, I could give you the number of my team, but the phone system might allocate you to another customer services representative, so...."
"So you can't then?"
"Well, no-one has ever asked that before."


Why not? Do you always tell people on the phone your personal details? I know that as I sit in an open-plan office, I can hear people trotting out their credit card numbers, date birth, mother's maiden name, first pet's name, inside-leg measurement, and postcode. I figure I might start temping and write down all of these things, and sell them to spotty teenagers so that they canm buy herbal high over the internet.
posted by Garreth at 5:25 AM

Do you ever feel like wiping out humanity? :  You know, when someone invents a new acronym, for a solution that merges together two other solutions, which are both made of bullshit-bingo phrases, which sums up to meaning absolutely nothing? If you can't beat them, join them. Anyone know of any jobs in advertising, where you get to sit in comfy chairs all day making this stuff up?
posted by Garreth at 5:12 AM

In sickness and in bed :  Being ill is quite good. You don't have to leave the house when it's raining. If you plan it right, you can wind up on the sofa with a couple of videos, not having to watch daytime chat shows. And avoid watching the News changing so slowly - the newsreaders dilligently repeating themselves every 30 minutes.

And you see all of the evening television too. Like Futurama. I met one of the Futurama writers once in Mexico. He claimed that the creative writing process was not as interesting as you'd imagine. In fact, after about three hours, he hadn't made me laugh once. I was disappointed, disillusioned. But then, being a new media celebrity myself, I suffer from the same reaction 'Oh you look so much taller on the internet.' or 'Where's your sun tan', or worst of all 'You're funnier on the web.' Another strange thing that happens when you have a few readers is that people send you weird emails, telling you about what they're cooking, and which boy-bands they like. Keep 'em coming.
posted by Garreth at 3:23 AM

10/29/2002

Tip of the Day :  When scuba diving, try not to wear a sombrero. While it may seem like a good idea on the surface, in the water it is a whole different kettle of piranhas. First, air bubbles collect in the top, making the hat bouyant. This has the adverse effect of making the string attaching the hat to your neck into a kind of cheesewire, cutting into your throat. Second, the hat rim will get in front of your eyes, making it impossible to see who is attacking you, in the invariable fancy dress underwater fight that will occur. Third, it scares the fish.
posted by Garreth at 3:34 AM

10/28/2002

Buses - you wait all day and then two come along at once :  The nervous web meister looks at his log files, and splutters his big slurpo bucket of caffeinated sugar all over his keyboard in disbelief. Surely there must be some mistake - his sites hits have gone up by 3000% in the last 24 hours.
"Arse," he grumbles, "must have finally turned up in a search engine for something like donkey does dallas on crack."
He'd learnt that old chestnut from web goddess, who has people turning up at her (largely inoffensive) site searching for things like 'crisp double breasted gimpwear'.

He checked his site for any dodgy words in close proximity in any of his articles, coming up with 'porno goth and crack' in one article. He checked google, which left his site in the clear. Apparently he meant pornogothic crack????

So then he figured it must be a conspiracy of all the wronged bike owners who had suffered bike theft between 1990 and 1994. He figured in a rare moment of paranoia that they were all ganging up against him, and were collecting a body of evidence to press charges.

But then he spotted a link to his site on blogger.com under 'sites of note'. Then he hatched a cunning plan to generate even more traffic by having an article with the words 'pornogothic' (he'd learnt a new word and was pleased to be able to use it so soon), 'crack', 'donkey' and 'does dallas' in the same sentence. All he'd have to do is sit back, wait for the search engines to pick up on it and wait for the sickos to start clicking through....

Hang on a minute, I don't like sickos.
posted by Garreth at 12:58 PM

No Bikes :  All generous offers of free bicycles to the usual address please. Thanks.
posted by Garreth at 12:28 PM

Bikes 22nd October 2002 :  Of course, having chained up my bike in front of the CCTV, and having gone to mash some heads in a martial art class, I was totally unprepared to be mugged. I walked outside the sports centre. I was alone, still feeling high from adrenaline, ahead of all of my fellow hardpeople.

I looked at the metal railing where my bike had been chained. That was the perfect time to mug me as I stood there, slightly confused and trying to remember if I really had left my trusty, rugged and beloved bike there just three hours before. I went back inside, asking if the staff had seen anyone nicking by sturdy steed.
"Nah - it happens all the time"
"Perhaps the theft is on the CCTV camera footage?" I venture
"Nah - they don't work too well in the dark - look" The muppet behind the desk shows me a shot from the camera - pitch black. "So if it happens all the time, and the camera doesn't work in the dark, do you think it might be an idea to get a camera that works in the dark, you moronic aunt?" I didn't reply.

Having gone through denial, I was now firmly into anger, as I stormed out of the sports centre. All psyched up about my loss of transport, I stalked the mean streets of Hammersmith, staring at any kids on bikes, looking for any sign of my beloved Raleigh Outback, thinking of all of the kung fu movies I'd seen, and what kind of damage getting kicked off a moving bicycle might inflict on a thief. Of course, I forgot that I can't kick higher than my knees yet. The thought that a misplaced kick at a bike thief might leave my foot caught in the spokes of my own bike didn't really enter my mind. 131,000 bikes were stolen in the UK last year. And the fact that one of them was mine might be a down payment on some of my karmic debt.
posted by Garreth at 12:26 PM

Goosing in Soho :  Its the internet, of course there's going to be photos. And photos of people in warm weather diving gear, and at the top of mountains.
posted by Garreth at 3:49 AM

10/24/2002

Bikes 1998-2002 :  About four years ago, I bought my own bike for hoofing around London on. It was great - brakes, tyres, even gears.I use it all the time to get to and from work. The best thing about bikes in London is that you can get get totally trolleyed, get onto your black bike, wearing black clothes, and weave off unlit towards oncoming traffic. Night after night, I have managed to evade large trucks, police cars, hot hatches and BMWs, while learning to ride with no hands on various parts of roundabouts and the A4. I even managed to avoid police horses, and most of the poo they leave smeared from one end of Uxbridge Road to the other as they patrol football matches at Loftus Road.

Police horses must be fed especially on boiled eggs and plain toast for a week, and possibly immodium. Then, the night of a footy game, they start to slip prunes and figs into their hay, so that they can project lumps of cack at any hoodlums. And police horses are a bit medieval aren't they? Send in men on big animals to force through crowds of people. Whatever happened to Police Rhinos?

I even used my bike to go to head kicking training, leaving it lovingly under the sports centre CCTV, outside my Wu Shu Kwan lesson. On Tuesday, I had as great time as ever. I got chance to spar with the master - he who can all but fly, as he whirls his legs around you like a horizontal helicopter. And then fully pumped up, I returned to my bike to cycle home.
posted by Garreth at 9:17 AM

Karma :  It's like, karma, man. You know - it happened on Sunday on a violently hungover quest for blood sugar from the Tube's chocolate vending machines. One machine swallowed 50p and despite a violent and bloody war of attrition with its eject button, the machine refused to do anything other than look smugly at me, withholding all of its snacktastic carbohydrates. The next machine took my 50p and delivered a squishily warm Cadbury's Whole Nut. The third machine accepted 50p and delivered both the Crunchie I'd asked for, and a Cadbury's Boost with Guarana and glucose. So some machines giveth, some taketh away. But it all adds up to the same.

It's quite worrying if you start to think about karma, and karmic debt late in life. You think about all the bikes you've nicked, all the insects you've crushed, all the orphanages you've locked and burnt to the ground. It's going to be a long haul, I can tell.

posted by Garreth at 8:40 AM

Snack o' the day :  Cadbury's Boost with added glucose. Shaft me sideways with a pogo stick. Someone call Tate and Lyle, get them to put a shiny wrapper around half a pound of sugar and call it a snack. What were Cadbury's thinking about?
Marketting 1: "I know, let's take chocolate, right, and lets put more sugar in it, in case you hadn't got enough of a rush from the bar. Which bar shall we do it to?"
Marketting 2: "Twix!"
Marketting 3: "Curly-wurly!"
Marketting 1: "I've got it, I've got it.... Boost! You know, like a boost, cos of all the sugar."
Marketting 2: "Yeah! And we can call it 'added Glucose' so that no-one will figure it's sugar."
Marketting 1: "Nice."
posted by Garreth at 8:37 AM

10/23/2002

Bikes 1990 - 1994 :  I used to be a card-carrying, parka and DMs wearing student. I studied in a small town where cycling was de rigeur. So strong was the bond with residents and bicycles, that hordes of angry cyclists would mob around one of the key roundabouts to protest about town traffic. The college bike shed, for which I had a key, held many rusty relics that had been abandonned by their owners many years before I bought my first pair of combat pants.

"What's green and takes two weeks to drink?". Not surprisingly, we had a bar in our college, that sold green drinks. "A grant cheque" - we had them in ye olde days. After embarking on a night of relentless table football and drinking, maybe a kebab would be in order before the chore of having to get home. Home was a good few miles off - over the river and far away. Money was tight - top priorities for any available cash were obviously burgers, hair dye kits, dungarees and whatever you could use to get out of your tree. (Don't forget that there's nitrous oxide in Soda Stream cartridges, kids). Buying bicycles and bus tickets was low on the list of priorities.

So it would seem churlish not to give the rusty neglected bicycles the good riding that they had been missing. This involved running into the dustiest corner of the bike shed, hoiking out a grimey bike and peddling it as fast as possible away from the CCTV cameras. If the bike had tyres and brakes, it would be kept and nurtured as a new slave, and given its own padlock and chain. If it didn't make the grade, it was entered into gladiatoral combat with a high bridge, gravity and a river. Invariably in such circumastances, the incumbant champions of this particular form of contest would team up against the new bicycle, and it would meet a watery end.

One bike that I treasured was a gold (painted) BMX. That stallion was the business for assaulting the big stone staircases around our college. My friends and I shared this opinion, as did someone else (perhaps its owner). The other unknown party cared enough about the golden mount to keep breaking the chains I was using to secure it in the bike shed, and reposessing the bike. It changed hands a few times - with my chain on, then its owners again, then mine again.

Bikes were great when you didn't have to pay for them - once when you are a kid and you get one for your birthday (which moron put Christmas in the middle of winter), the other time was when you thieved them.
posted by Garreth at 8:18 AM

10/22/2002

Yes god, I'm a winner :  I recently won a radio competition involving a photograph I sent in. (Far be it from me to tell people what makes good radio).
Still on a winning tip, I approached the counter at Tescos this afternoon. I knew I was going to win the competition on the wrapper, before I selected the product. Far be it from me to start advertising chewing gum, by mentioning the competition details here to my loyal fanbase. Nevertheless, lo and behold, I done gone and won it. A bleeding CD.
But did I really know that I was going to win? Or in fact, do I have thousands of such thoughts about future events which never come to fruition? My only data to answer that question is that I was genuinely surprised when I found out that I had not won the national robbery a few weeks ago. Maybe I'm a daydreamer.
posted by Garreth at 12:08 PM

10/20/2002

"All bets are off!" - declare outclassed amateur lunatics :  The professional, A-grade, bull-goose loonies seem to hang around the landmark train stations of London, as if drawn to them by a set of circumstances that tipped them over the edge during a game of Monopoly. We met one such nut-case in Victoria - obviously, the guy hadn't been studying his boardgames accurately. Maybe it was a game of Cluedo that sent this guy on his way to a life on the run from the men with white coats and large butterfly nets.

He had moves, a routine, and his delivery and timing were awesome. Maybe this is a new generation of comic - a guy who doesn't perform on stage, but who joins you at your table in a pub, and makes you happy. He was that good at being a loon, that it seemed he was a professional.

The blowing and humming at odd times into his pint, the standing up for no reason to do a bit of a jig, and the interjection of half words and half sentences into a normal conversation were great. The occasional slip into a scottish accent, and saying things like "Jim, Jim Morrisson, oh, ahh, hmm, yes." could have been straight from a Paul Whitehouse character - maybe one who would end by saying we were "very, very dwunk".

But he was particularly impressed with our game of Telecom Sumo, so hopefully we provided him with some entertainment too, as pay out for his comedy routine.
posted by Garreth at 6:59 AM

Radio Competition Sued by Imprisoned Alcoholics - "They were just doing what the little voices told them to," claims defence lawyer :  There's a radio advertisment which announces that you could win three days all expenses paid in a pub for you and your mates. To win this questionable prize, not sponsored by Bupa, you have to send in drinking stories, telling the judges how stupid you've been while under the influence. The advert goes on to give examples to help refresh your gin soaked memory - flashing lights you've stolen, strange places you've passed out in - student-type antics.

I guess the competition isn't open to homeless alcoholics, who have woken up after seven years of drinking in a pile of their own coal-black faeces with only three teeth left, and scabies. Something like not letting professional athletes compete in the olympics. But it got me thinking of stuff - road signs stolen, roads cordoned off, waking up in a workman's hut at the side of the M69. And a colleague mentioned that he had broken into the St. Pancras hotel one night for a bit of an explore. I'm sure the competition sponsors would be only too pleased to find that my train of thought moved on to trying to get into trouble specifically to enter the competition.

I met a group of old friends in a high-ceilinged pub in Finchley, and started to put the foundation pints in. From such tiny acorns, all manner of trouble can sprout. The pub failed to throw us out for fetching take-aways in, and devouring them at our table. They didn't say anything when we started trying to amuse ourselves with fire at the table. Putting lighter gas into empty bottles and then lighting them soon grew dull, so I decided to make a flamethrower with two straws and a beer bottle full of butane. With a degree in chemistry, Ramon pointed out that the carbon dioxide in my breath would stifle the flames. As any scuba diver will tell you, the body is quite crap at making carbon dioxide out of air, but the CO2 content wasn't really an issue when I blew down one straw into the bottle, and held a lighter by the other straw sticking out.

For some reason, it didn't occur to me that heat rises, flames hurt the eyes, and faces should not be burnt in public places. All of these things rushed through my mind as the burning butane rushed into my face and a fireball engulfed half of it. After a short silence from the assembled fans, and a fair bit of squinting on my part, I opened my eyes, pleased that I could still see, while the smell of burning hair permeated everyone's nostrils. Maybe it's Maybelline that gives me thicker lashes - maybe its the burning hair and the shrivelling effect of the resulting heat, as Maybelline doesn't make your eyelashes shorter, with blobs of charcoal at the tips. Well, not if yuo apply it properly.

Still looking for high jinks, I tried to get through the emergency exit to the roof of the pub, but it was locked. Jinks had to wait. Struggling to find somewhere that sould serve booze after closing time, Ramon and I headed to Camden to a late bar which sold us donkey vodka in large measures, and gave us the opportunity to meet a couple from Peckham. Too drunk to focus, or to properly hear what the couple were saying, a round of Chinese shouts erupted - I had assumed that they had said I was ballsy, but the message finally got through via Ramon that they thought at least one of us had a palsy. It didn't make much sense to me, so we moved on to the Electric Ballroom, looking for some morbid goths to point and shout at.

I was clutching my copy of Irvine Welsh's Pawnoh - a book whose cover disguises it as an inflatable love doll in a box. Ho ho ho, those publishing wags at Random House, little did they realise that your average bouncer wouldn't cotton on to the subtle disguise, and would assume it was, indeed, a blow up doll. The bouncer who discovered my 'doll' decided to have a long conversation with me about what he would do to me if he caught me in one of the toilets with my plastic lover, but finally let me in

And what a sight greeted mine eyes once inside. Goths. Hundreds of Goths. Smiling and dancing gaily, pilled up to the eyeballs on ecstacy. What ever happened to the moody Edgar Allen Poe reading miseryguts with the bangles and the ribbons? They decided to cheer up, that's what happened. But despite this, the DJ refused to play Kylie, insisting that the other DJ in the booth wouldn't like it. I find that hard to believe, given that the man in question had his guts and tattoos out, and had his arms outstretched at the crowd, with his head tipped back, and his eyeballs investigating the upper reaches of his skull. I think the man in question would have been happy if someone had mixed in a few bars of "The Theme from Ghostbusters", and would have probably peed his leather pants with excitement if Kylie had been put on.

Not much trouble to be had in there, so after a bit more drinkin and dancin, we headed out to the street. It was time to try to up the stakes with the weed-pusher outside, so we demanded he sell us some crack. No, not over here, we made the little man accompany us to a dark alleyway, where he began to get a bit edgy, demanding to see our money.

Truth be told, I wasn't really interested in buying any crack from the nasty man, but that didn't seem to please him too much, so he started to follow us complaining about wasted time. "Opportunity cost, " I muttered but he wasn't being particularly entertaining or interesting any more, having exhausted his entertainment repertoire. To be honest, the delivery of the hackneyed dealer phrases was a bit lack-lustre - "the cameras, man," "CCTV," "nah the polis is coming," "tenner deal," "some nice green." Sensing no more fun was on offer, we decided to leave, but our new found amigo insisting on sitting in the back seat of the minicab we had convinced to take us to Shepherd's Bush for whatever price the driver had decided to charge us based on our drunkness, and not having a clue how far away it was.

Time to call in the old "stare the nasty man in the eyes" routine, with what I hope looks like menace, but probably looks more like blank cluelessness. Having to close one eye to stop him from moving about too much probably undermines the intent of the glare. It must have worked though because he got out, with only mild physical coercion, allowing us to drive away into the night.

Apart from a few bizarre SMS messages sent at 3:30 from my housemate's mobile phone to most of the people in her address book, the opportunities for the kind of drunken larks which would win a competition were waning, along with our energy.We had to leave it to the Saturday session to finish off the job of collecting entry material...

posted by Garreth at 6:46 AM

10/18/2002

Mo' trouble :  OK. Enough snack of the day. C'est le weekend, il faut get en trouble.
posted by Garreth at 4:46 AM

10/17/2002

Snack of the day :  Kinder Bueno. Lick my ripples indeed. Nasty, nasty, nasty. Don't do it kids, drink petrol rather than eat one of these over-priced, individually wrapped fingers of wishy washy sugar. Think of the money they spent advertising and there are only two choices: get a job in advertising, or buy a Star Bar instead. They never advertise and taste just fine. You won't find a Star Bar site on the web, oh no, but Kinder 'Blown our budget on new-media' Bueno's got one. Back to basics, Kinder. I bet you're Swiss, like those muppets that invented internet time, aren't you?
posted by Garreth at 9:23 AM

10/16/2002

Taking names in the morning, kicking ass in the evening :  "Kick me," he said, not moving, and purposely left his ribs exposed, below the large red gloves on his motionless fists. I aimed a slow kick at the target, stopping just short of his abdomen. "No, kick me!" I had another go, and again he remained stock still. I landed the side of my feet a few inches above the brown belt coiled around his kickboxing garb. But still with no force. He saw that I didn't really get the principle of full-contact so-near-so-sparring, this being my first time, but he was patient - "No, really kick me!"

I kicked him. It felt good. Very good. Especially as my sparring partner was under strict instructions not to hurt me back, and instead, moved about very slowly, while encouraging me to hit him. Great fun - big ear-to-ear grin type of fun. I can see the attraction of putting fish in a barrel and having a go at them with a shotgun now.
posted by Garreth at 4:53 AM

BMX XXX - yes that's right, 4X like the beer :  Acclaim are going to release a game with strippers and pimps - 'Keeping it dirty'. I hope you get to toast people like in Grand Theft Auto III. Incidentally, I'm surprised that some crazy fundamentalist american didn't try to get someone to take the cop-killling and fireman-roasting parts out of Grand Theft Auto III in light of trying to have less fun after September 11th. Actually, the promos for BM4X look quite amusing, though it's a shame its about bicycles. But then I guess that's what they pay ad agencies for. Making you think things are going to be good, not cycling, I mean.
posted by Garreth at 3:09 AM

10/15/2002

Studid Swiss Muppets :  Sod Iraq, let's invade Switzerland. They don't even have an army to speak of - they just give everyone a gun, like living in the US, only cheaper for gun-toting psychos, and harder to track down serial snipers. They've only invented a new time system with a meridian through some nonsense city in Heidi-land. Tw*ts.
posted by Garreth at 7:17 AM

Fighting goes soap :  Wow, ITVDigital has gone down the pan, so I don't get any WWE access any more. It's hard trying to keep up on the WWE site - it all sounds so crazy unless you see it:

"Later in the show, a confused Kane decided it was time to set the record straight. In a remorseful voice, Kane admitted that he was somewhat responsible for Katie Vick's death, however, he claimed that it was an accident. According to Kane, he was simply driving her home from a party because she had too much to drink. The weather was bad and visibility became low. It was then that Kane drove off the road. The accident broke Kane's arm, but took Katie's life.

Triple H soon came from the backstage area to interject. According to The Game, Kane's story was only partly true. Kane apparently forgot to mention that he too had been drinking. In addition, Triple H mentioned that at Katie's autopsy, doctors found traces of Kane's semen, leaving Hunter to ask two upsetting questions -- Did Kane force himself on her while she was alive? Or did he wait until she was dead?"

I can't imagine JR saying "SEMEN". I just have to see it. Right after Jackass the Movie
posted by Garreth at 4:02 AM

10/14/2002

Live by the surf, die by the surf :  Things that are great on small islands where there are no police: you can burn things, you can chop things down, you can sledgehammer things into the sand, and you can claim anything that washes up on the beach as your own.

A great thing washed up on a beach once. It wasn't discovered for quite some time. By this time it had been gradually lifted by the highest of high tides onto a large rock, which none of the successive tides could ever aspire to. The hollowed-out half of the enormous tree was literally beached. Grounded. People eventually discovered the mighty dug-out, and spun wild tales of how it could be floated once more and used to paddle off into the sunset, though they all realised that they would never be able to drag the 40 foot plank from where the mighty sea had tossed it, high upon a rock. It was christened 'the dug-out' by the locals.

The island upon which the giant tree had landed was also visited by another magnificent piece of wood. A separate beach, maybe a mile away, was harpooned by what looked like a telegraph pole. When this remote pole was found by an idle beach-comber, out looking for driftwood to make a bench, it was found to be two telegraph pole sized timbers, pinned together by a two foot long iron spike. The fact that someone had wrapped thick iron rope around the join made it seem that this was a deliberate and rugged pairing of poles. The beach-comber soaked in the magnificence of his find. This pole could be used for anything to make his life more entertaining - perhaps it could be driven into the seabed to jump from. Perhaps it could be covered in diesel and burnt. Or maybe it could form the arm of a giant catapault, used to hurl cats far out into the bay....

It took a lot of effort to move the pole back to basecamp. Far too heavy for less than four men to lift, dragging it into the sea and swimming was the only option. It was remarkably easy to propel along its length, but trying to balance astride the log proved taxing - it would spin around and bear some of its rusty iron work into the flesh of any rider. Perhaps the wood still harboured anger at humans, who had probably strapped it together to form the mast of an ill-fated ship. It got back to base eventually, after a good deal of paddling, and it was then that the beachcomber decided to return for what was surely to be the highest achievement of his beachcombing career. The dug-out.

The dug-out had different ideas about being combed from its resting place, but it couldn't deny the levering and determination of the beachcomber. A six foot pole dug again and again at the base of the monster plank. The beach comber would not be denied, and furiously pushed and pulled at each end of it, trying to rock it off its rock. In spite of gravity, momentum and the David and Goliath sizes of the participants, the beachcomber persisted for 45 minutes with the muscle straining battle. Crabs and lizards had fled their woody home by the time the log finally made in into the foam of the high-tide, and the log was swum round to basecamp.

That beachcomber was me. John must take all of the credit for the design, not of the giant catapault that followed the provision of such fine pieces of timber, but of Greeforce V, the finest raft ever seen on the tiny island upon which it was built. John can be seen here with the beast, which can't be fitted fully into the camera's viewfinder. The raft also has mosquito net bundles of empty plastic bottles incorporated, but the bouyancy of these was minimal compared to the logs. But some crazy Brit has extended this idea to make his own island. Which is a pretty good idea.

The worst thing about having an enormous raft with telegraph pole outriggers on a small island, is that you have to 'make it safe' when leaving the island. And then a storm comes along and buries it deep in the sand somehow, so that the part of the hollowed out log protruding from the sand has become a kind of dog kennel. Easy come, easy go I suppose, and it stops anyother humans from getting pleasure from our marvellous craft. Especially since the dog who has taken up residence in it is called 'Knee Gnaw'. Because she gnaws at your knees if you get too close.
posted by Garreth at 6:26 AM

Slap her, she's French : 
posted by Garreth at 2:56 AM

10/11/2002

The good doctor :  I used to drink root-beer at McDonalds. It tastes like TCP. It's good for hangovers, maybe because it tastes so bad it must be healthy. Maybe because it's packed with sugar. (Do teeth dissolve in coke? - too much time on someone's hands) Now I drink Dr Pepper, which apparently doesn't have anti-freeze in it. People take their soft drinks quite seriously it seems.

Oh yeah, don't forget it's anti-McDonalds day on Wednesday. (burn some animals, trees, burger-bars etc. before McD's can get to them)
posted by Garreth at 4:29 AM

10/10/2002

Terrorists have attacked London :  Look around Londoners, the evidence is in front of your very eyes. Everyone I've seen in London today has got bleary eyes, and is yawning. The attack was possibly perpetrated last night. It involved making super loud high frequency noises, only perceptable to the sleeping. These super-noises can waken the sleeping, leaving them without a clue as to why they are awake, but at the same time, a waking human would have no idea that anything had happened. Dogs, however aren't so lucky. They are driven to distraction by the evil terrorist super-noises, and have been in constant agony all night. Have you not noticed them in hedgerows, trying to gnaw off their limbs?

What a great way to undermine a country's economy - make everyone in that country about 70% more tired. More likely to make mistakes, inadvertantly dig up gas mains, trade millions of pounds of stock twice by hitting 'Enter' twice, accidentally leave the keys in the intercontinental balistic missiles when you nip off for a cuppa....
posted by Garreth at 10:30 AM

10/09/2002

Can Can Kwan :  It's like being the spastic beginner in a step aerobics / boxercise / tai bo class. You don't have a chance of following the moves of the person in front though. Because she's the nutter who is doing skipping tricks while she's waiting to start the class - spinning the rope beneath her three times as she leaps into the air. Her legs are too fast to follow - all you get is a hummingbird blur of limbs. You can't pick out what she's doing as you move forward and backwards in the hall.But you have to keep moving forward and backwards in time with everyone, otherwise the enormous fishmonger behind you will kick you in the back of the head.

He has to be a fishmonger, either that or he keeps recently deceased fish in his gym bag, and rubs his wrists on them just before he starts the Wu Shu Kwan lessons. And get this, the instructor really can fly - the Guinness Book of Records says so.
posted by Garreth at 3:06 AM

10/07/2002

Can o' Sugar :  They use Coca-cola to clear up blood from the highway. Just one fizzy drink makes me feel great, like Tony. Two makes me giggle. Three makes me shake and tremble. It was after just one drink that I found the Evil Gerald though, and it made me tremble and giggle. It's like the Onion only cheaper.
posted by Garreth at 7:34 AM

Pork Pie Relapse :  I don't know what happened, I swear I hadn't even thought of them since the start of September. But it just happened. I went into the Co-op on Friday, under the guise of buying an Evening Standard, and without knowing why, I turned left at the first aisle, and stopped in front of the "Snack Pork Pie" shelf. And because there weren't any individual snack pies, I bought a two pack. Too ashamed to return home with them, I actually went into the pub across the road and ordered a cheeky pint, before retiring to a table at the back of the bar.

Too embarrassed to even let the giffers in the pub see me devouring jelly, fat and pastry, I snaffled them behind the open pages of the ES Magazine. I thought I'd got away with it. But then these two hell-hound Doberman Rott-Bulls show up on the floor. They'd clearly been trained to sniff out undesirables, and one of them came straight at me, jumping to get its massive front paws on the table in front of me, rooting around the ashtray where I'd foolishly left the telltale wrapper on display. It didn't give up easy, but I managed to pursuade the canine bouncer that it was nothing to do with me, and that licking my still porky fingers wasn't really very constructive. I was quite literally hounded out of the pub for my crimes against pork.
posted by Garreth at 7:01 AM

Simple exercise - astronauts, race-car drivers, firemen need not apply :  Some gimp out of a pop-band wants to be an astronaut and fly into space. His backers were supposed to stump up something towards the 20 squillion lira it costs to train the gimp. Here's the thing though. Proper astronauts, people that go into space because they always wanted to be an astronaut, please mum, buy me a rocket ship, if you get me a rocket ship, I'll never ask for anything else ever again, people who are proper astronauts, they get paid to do it. Probably by taxes that we pay, but don't start me on taxes.

So, if you are at work today, try this simple exercise. Ask the first three people that you see:

"Did you always say that you wanted to do this job when you were little?"


posted by Garreth at 2:46 AM

10/04/2002

Tongue-Thaied :  Breakfast - a bacon and edge sandwich from a Thai cafe, from a Thai bloke called Jeff.
Lunch - a foetid old man's smelling of wee pub. With 'authentic' Thai food, and a curious barmaid who is neither Thai nor English, and seems to struggle with communication to staff and customers alike.
Dinner - perhaps one of the plethora of Thai outlets in London.

I love Thai food. But why would Thai people want to live and work in England? Maybe for the same reason I do - so I can go and build a hut on a beach in Thailand and sit about doing nothing for a year or two later. Nice.
posted by Garreth at 9:31 AM

10/03/2002

"What goes ha ha ha - bonk?" :  Someone sent me a link to the funniest joke in the world. Didn't exaclty make me laugh.

Oh, yeah, "A man laughing his head off."
posted by Garreth at 11:10 AM

10/02/2002

Prozac Notion :  If you've ever forced yourself to read all of the way to the end of Elizabeth 'Shoot me I'm so depresssed' Wurtzel's Prozac Nation, you'll know how tedious and irritating it is to find out every miserable detail of someone's life as a depressed person. The excrutiating detail of every manic episode of self-obsessed gibbering. The cycles of being unbearable to her friend and relative.

So today, avid readers, you are treated to a moment of joy in the life of the returned sabbaticaller. And not just the fact that I'm down to sausage and bacon every second work-day, or that the sandwich man came in earlier than usual today at work.

No, today I won a competition. Partly because I had one ear tuned into XFM, and I entered one of my photos into a Kevin Greening competition. It turned out that he liked it, although not as much as the photo of a naked couple wearing Maltesers, and so I got tickets to go and see some fancy film premiere. Hurrah. Tomorrow in Soho Square. Hurrah. With free refreshments. Hurrah. And the naked people from the Malteser photo, Hurrah.

At 6pm when I'm going to be in a meeting with a client 40 minutes away in Hammersmith. Bugger.
posted by Garreth at 11:49 AM

10/01/2002

Hypochondriacs Addendum :  I've just found out that I might not have Attention Deficit Disorder after all. Apparently, 'High scores on this examination may result from anxiety, depression or mania'. Wicked, more stuff to get anxious about potentially having. But being back at work is bound to be depressing after six months sitting about, right? Well it is for me, but everyone else I've spoken to has said that they kind of expected work to be crap, so it didn't bother them. What really bothered them was the miserable people hating their jobs that live back home.

Well for me, I expect to enjoy work. Not just because my self-help books tell me to, in the same way they tell me not to drink milk with Prozac on an empty stomach. But because it should be fun.

What is it like being back at work? That's not the question people ask me. What I get asked is, "Are you back in the swing of things yet?"
This has to be some sort of euphemism, and I've spent a short while trying to figure out what people are really saying:

• "Has the youth and exuberance been sucked out of you yet?"
• Have you submitted to the overbearing futility of what we do here yet, or do you still have the high-fallutin' ideas of a man with per-spek-tiv?"
• Have you been normalised to someone who fits in with the kind of thing that happens here?"
• "Do you have that resigned look yet?"

No-one has asked me if I'm having fun yet. Wassup? No, really what's the matter? Why don't people expect me to be having a blast doing what I'm doing? And if they do, why isn't that what they ask? I remember a great colleague of mine telling me that you should only turn up because they pay you to, after all, if they didn't pay you, you wouldn't do it. Bollocks to that, say I. I work here because there's enough fun here to stop me going to have fun somewhere else.

Reality was a bit different to that over the last few weeks though. Often, the best reason for going to work sometimes is the fact that a few doors down is a cafe that has wicked sausage and bacon rolls. Documents you need to read are shown to you and they just look like lists of words. With some words in bigger letters than other words. Reading them past the contents and introduction is a real challenge. Falling asleep staring at your screen in the early afternoon is generally frowned upon. Your boss asks you what time you arrive in the morning so he can meet you for a career-shaping meeting full of opportunity, and you reply, "Oooh, about ten-ish".

Actually, my boss is OK. He took me for breakfast at the great cafe down the road, and actually asked me if I was enjoying things. So I mustn't grumble.

posted by Garreth at 11:47 AM

Attention Span of a Gold.... :  Enough already with the PowerPoint. Luckily I have the attention span of a golfish, (as well as the conversation skills of a goldfish). I blame it on the internet. It feels good having something to blame. Especially the internet, as it rarely complains. I went to an island to get away from my internet addiction. I didn't check email, or look up the answer to anything for about nine weeks. But you're not supposed to do overseas voluntary work to get away from addictions. It says so in my book. At least I'm not addicted to self-help books anymore.

Another reason I went away is the accursed Siemens SL45 bag-o-shite that masquerades as both a crap mobile phone, and an underpowered MP3 player. Not only does it fail to adequately perform any of it's long list of functions, but its SMS interface is pants. I kept writing messages and attempt to send them by pressing a series of buttons which said things like 'OK', 'Yes', 'No, really, ready to send', but I'd never get all the way through to the last button which really, really meant you wanted to send it. But I didn't know they weren't being sent. So I was a bit perplexed as to why my friends weren't answering my messages. So I decided to leave the country. Actually, I tell a lie about the Siemens SL45. It does make a passable, if expensive, dictaphone, which is useful to remember what you were saying to people. This came in useful to capture Joe telling a nice girl we met in a cake shop that he wanted to take her to the biggest restaurant in the world. And the nice girl trying to improve Joe's Thai pronunciation.

But I digress. But that's because I've got attention deficit disorder. Is that my attention span thats lacking? Or that I need attention? I can't be arsed to read the whole lot, but I do feel that 'My thoughts bounce around as if my mind is a pinball machine', and 'My brain feels as if it is a television set with all the channels going at once'. But I have no fear, as ironically enough, the internet has lots of sites giving information about the short attention span that using the internet causes. Luckily most of the articles are quite short.

Given that I'd escaped the internet on my beloved island, I'll get back to the way my mind worked when I was there. What I loved about the island is that you could wander about on the way to doing something and really easily get involved in something else. You might be going to drop something in the dive-shack, and you'd find an inflatable boat that you could repair. So you might go to get some glue. On the way you might stumble into a conversation about something, or a pull-up exhibition and get embroiled in that, until someone needed some firewood to cook some dough in the oven. So you'd go to get your jungle-proof shirt from the washing line. And you'd see Alli chasing the chickens because they had invaded the (defenseless and crippled) ducks pen. So you'd start a pincer movement with Rich to drive the inconsiderate hens into a bucket so that you could throw them into the sea. And when the hens had invariably outpaced us over some of the dangerous terrain, you'd end up repairing the duck pen.

After that, you might remember that the chickens job was to lay eggs, and you'd check their hutch for evidence of any protein balls that they'd deposited. This might lead you back to the kitchen with fresh eggs, and then you might get involved in a bean-burger disposal exercise. This invovled trying to drop kick all of the left-over kidney-bean-based-burgers as far as possible into the sea. I'd lovingly handmade those burgers with Ros and Jamal, and the pigs weren't going to get them, that was for certain. Feed the fishes, screw the pigs, that's what I'd say, until the RSPCA turned up.

So then you might see the dough hanging about, waiting to be cooked, and you'd remember the firewood, and like a goldfish, do another lap of the hut, doing simple things on the way. Eventually, you'd see enough of the things that you were in the middle of doing to give you some kind of mental escape velocity. You'd get enough pointers and clues to allow you to follow the trail of activities that you had half-started, and start to half-finish them.

Talking to an ex-colleague last night, I said that I wouldn't mind doing a lot of meditation somewhere for a while. She had tried a ten day retreat here in the UK, and said that she managed to escape with most of her sanity after four days. Apart from the knowledge that she had endured 96 hours of mental cruelty and anguish, she said that it wasn't all bad. A new string to her bow was the ability to see tasks through to their completion without being horrifically distracted. I could do with some of that.
posted by Garreth at 11:34 AM

I Dare You, I Double Dare You :  Send me one more PowerPoint presentation, go on. Just what I need, more sodding glib colourful pictures with text flying in from the left and right. That'll cheer me up. If you do wish to send me some more presentations, take a look at the last jellyfish that sent me one. We'll put you in a bucket and pull you out to torture you. With big electrodes. Fourteen presentations have been sent to me so far today, with an average of 34 pages in each, making 476 pages of PowerPoint evil. Stop, I'm drowning. Hahaha. It's fifteen now.
posted by Garreth at 7:32 AM