11/27/2002

Double Entendres :  Finbar Saunders - where are you now? They say that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. Which means that double entendres are at worst the second lowest form of wit.

When I got a completely innocent email from someone called David Large, which asked for some help, and offered chocolates as an incentive to help him, I was pissing my sides. "Mr. Large is offering chocolate incentives" was how I read it. It got worse. I was explaining to someone that my central heating had stopped working, and that I had diagnosed the problem whilst on the phone to my long-suffering father. "My old boiler needs a better pump," was the result. It seems that the double entendre hemisphere of my brain has taken over. Perhaps it was seeing the Fast Show live on stage.

posted by Garreth at 12:26 PM

My way, your way, anything goes tonight :  Five good things about being a known crack dealer:

• You can carry off wearing silly hats. No-one will say anything
• You can park your battered Mercedes anywhere on the street you live, blocking in other cars willy-nilly. No-one compains
• People will always come to visit you - you're never lonely - even at 3 a.m.
• Entertainment is provided by violent discussions in the night - right in the street - easily visible from any house : "Would you kindly move your vehicle off my foot?" etc.
• You can live next door to me

Word of the month :  Ballbags.

No ballbags booze for 30 days now.

Have you ever been invited to a party that lasted longer than you thought? Bez, goggle-eyed convulsive dancer from the Happy Mondays, once had a party that went on for some days. A neighbour went to complain about the noise. He left a week later. The party lasted four months. I was planning on doing a bit of drinking on Friday night....
posted by Garreth at 3:13 AM

11/20/2002

What is IT good for? Absolutely nothing. Say it again. :  Not drinking booze in pubs part II: conversation overheard last night:

IT consultant 1: Yeah, yeah, I know. But when we form this super-company, we can keep it nice and small - about 50 people. And if all of our people are multi-skilled, then they can work on site, with the customer. They'll work side by side with the users, and understand the problems and processes, so they'll be able to build better systems, that actually do what people want them to do. We can build better human-computer interfaces. It'll be wicked
IT consultant 2: But don't you think that it will upset the users you're working with - basically you're making a system to put them out of a job, to increase efficiency.
IT consultant 1: True, you've got to be able to go to the CEO and say 'I need you to fire these 500 people'. The CEO is your customer, so that's why it doesn't matter that the users don't like you.
IT consultant 2: Hang on, the users, well, they'll resist the change. They won't tell you what they do, if they understand what it is that they do. They'll sabotage everything. They're users - it's their job security they're giving away everytime they tell your supernerds what it is that they do
IT consultant 1: But the CEO has to trust you, and force people to tell you. And then sack them anyway.
IT consultant 2: Where is all of this going? What's the world going to be like with all of these super efficient companies, with no people working in them any more? When the companies are just big sets of systems made by supernerds that talk to other systems made by supernerds? Aren't you making humanity redundant?
IT consultant 3 (my favourite): Will we get more leisure time?
IT consultant 1: Well there's a theory that capitalism is just about making a two tier society where there are people like us - the supernerds - and then there's the proletariat who eat gruel. That's where it's heading.
IT consultant 2: I don't mind that, but can I work at home as a supernerd?
IT consultant 1: Absolutely not! It won't work! You have to be with these users face to face. You have to work with them, and understand what they do.
IT consultant 2: Maybe that's true, but can't I communicate with users from home with video conferencing, email, telephones?
IT consultant 1: No way! It doesn't work! People are designed to talk to people - look at our body language now. You don't get people talking to Cathode Ray Screens and them talking back - it's a crazy idea.
IT consultant 3: Hold your horses there, buster - doesn't that kind of make it a bit ill fated to build computer systems that people have to work with in the first place? If that form of communication isn't effective? Doh.


posted by Garreth at 11:25 AM

11/19/2002

Gambia bound :  Tips and tricks for getting lashed in Gambia to the usual address please. Having not even sniffed alcohol for 25 days, something's got to give.
posted by Garreth at 2:34 AM

Eighties pop stars :  Working with 80s pop stars is great. Tales of wild abandon, parties, funny clothes. Then the obligatory change in career. What was Dave Stewart like? Which was your favourite member of Bananarama? Oooh, hours of fun.

Also, any ex-pop star is bound to be able to think in strange and inventive ways:

"And soon, everyone will have a GoogleChip - they will not need to remember anything - they just think something - a question - and they have the knowledge."

posted by Garreth at 2:33 AM

11/15/2002

A night out with Lionel Richie :  Thank God. Lionel will save lack of attendance at a charity event that I have been invited to. Lionel - come back - we've missed you. "Is it me you're looking for?"

Walking back from the Fast Show Live after having laughed my guts out, a public telephone started to ring as I passed it. In my mind, people who answer such calls are more than likely to get immersed in the seedy urban underbelly of mafia life / engaged in daring jungle escapades / get to rescue distressed kittens. So I went to answer the phone. It stopped ringing before I picked up though. But it made me remember a youth of death threats and harrassings. All you do is get the phone number of a public phone in site of another public phone. Then you get the operator to initiate a reverse-charged or collect call to one box from the other.

When a passer-by picks up the call, and accepts the call, you can give them a ransom demand for the mayor's daughter and see how they react. They normally hang up when you threaten to send them her fingers if they don't stop pretending that they don't know what you're talking about.
posted by Garreth at 12:47 PM

11/14/2002

Choose your poison :  I haven't drunk booze in 19 days. I've tried eating intestine-melting curry. I've tried lifting heavy things, drinking gallons of water. I've even tried sleep deprivation. Of all of these things, sleep deprivation has come closest to the familiarness of alcohol. So this morning, when I dragged myself out of a bed I'd only just got into, I felt suitably brain-dead. I couldn't think - cotton wool was stuffed between my capacity to think and my thoughts. Regaining (partial) consciousness, I started to wonder what was real, and what was a dream.

As my little VC buddy would say:

"Dar fust dwink, dar man dwink dar bottul. Dar segon dwink, dar bottul dwink dar bottul. Dar turd dwink, dar bottul dwink dar man."

At which point, my dwinking buddy would chip in,

"Then the bottle drinks the vodka, then the vodka goes to a nightclub and eats a kebab."
posted by Garreth at 1:11 PM

11/12/2002

Water, water, everywhere :  I haven't had any booze for 16 days. Last night I dreamt about having a sneaky can of super-strength cider down my neck. No hallucinations of note as yet.
posted by Garreth at 11:40 AM

11/10/2002

And the streets are paved with drugs and profanity :  Uxbridge Road, scene of mediocre football violence, chip-shop violence, and now pedestrian rage. A mild mannered Saturday outing to eat Portuguese chicken led to an ugly situation where cars were overturned and seven people were hospitalised.

The prosecution claim that it all started when the pedestrian turned 'anti-profanity vigilante' bought Grand Theft Auto 3 - Vice City. Glued to his screen, the would-be hooligan learnt to pick up whores in stolen cars and then slash them to bloody ribbons with a meat cleaver. He learnt to barge into nightclubs and hose the YMCA act on stage with an assault rifle, and force people to dance with him before sticking a chainsaw in their chests. And crucial to the case for the prosecution, this is where he would learn to drag people out of their cars by their hair, knee them in the head, and then kick their twitching bodies until pools of blood announced their final demise. The vigilante was described by flat mates as a 'sick weirdo' as he played out sadistic fantasies in the game.

Mailbu: "Perhaps I could speak in my defence your honour? It was about 12:30 on Saturday afternoon. I had, it's true been playing a violent video game with a 'mature theme', while listening to the hauntingly familiar 80s sound track. A friend called on his way to a test drive, and we departed for lunch. On making our way into the middle of the road, we paused for the stream of traffic on the far side."

M'Lud: "Would you describe that as Jay Walking, Mr. Malibu?"

Malibu: "No, your honour, that's a rediculous law dreamt up in the US to allow donut munching cops to keep their arrest rate up, and because of all the inbred rednecks who would otherwise walk into traffic and get crook lawyers to sue car manufacturers, road builders and city planners."

M'Lud: "OK - what happened next then Mr. Malibu?"

Malibu: "Well we were stood between the two streams of traffic in the centre of the road. We were waiting for either a gap in the traffic, or for the traffic lights to turn red. Then the gentleman over there..."

Court Secretary: "Please note, Mr. Malibu is pointing to the gentleman in the body-cast in the gallery."

Malibu: "...then the gentleman over there, driving his frankly outdated Vauxhall, shouts through his lowered window: 'The light is f*cking green, you c*nts', as he drove past. Well, the rest of what happens is a blur - it's as though life became a great big video game - and his cursing at me was like a trigger. Like something which made me snap back into the video game. The next thing I knew was that my friend was pulling me off his bleeding body, and the car door was open, and my first instinct was to just get in this guy's car and hightail it out of there..."

Some odd things did happen on Saturday; a man did hurl abuse at my road crossing technique at me. I later found a ziploc bag with approximately ten grams of white powder on the street outside a theatre. The couple in front of us had stopped to look at the bag, but were hesitant to pick it up. Figuring it might be worth a fair few notes if it was indeed the finest Columbian, I bent down and picked it up and smiled at them. They seemed satisfied with that and the fact that I was waving around the bag and telling my fellow theatre-goers that I had found shit loads of white powder, and moved off.

My test-driving friend and I tasted the powder, deciding that it wasn't too tasty, and didn't make us feel invincible, utterly interesting, and the most attractive people on the planet, but I still held out a glimmer of hope that I held 500 GBP of something in my pocket. It burnt a hole in it all of all the walk home. Past the queue of lecherous paedophiles in training as they waited to get into School Disco - past the Antipodeans and smell of late night beery piss they had liberally doused around the street outside their tribal gathering place - the Walkabout. I reached home and casually tossed the baggie onto a table.

"Washing powder," claimed my flat mate in obvious disappointment. Bugger.

posted by Garreth at 11:25 AM

Pyramid sales organisation uncovered in local 'fight club' :  The welcoming facade of one Hammersmith kickboxing club hides a curious secret. New members are received warmly into the club, and allowed to spar with the instructors. The instructors are not only involved in tuition and sparring, but are almost certainly in league with the equipment shops which provide official merchandise. Nothing new in that racquet you might think. But based on this reporter's experience on Saturday afternoon, it seems that these instructors are prepared to stop at nothing to gain sales, even going so far as to kick new members in the bread basket and elbow their feet repeatedly to ensure that official club protective gear is bought. This reporter has difficulty walking right now, but has somehow been brainwashed with the sense of community that the cult, sorry, club builds up. In fact this reporter actually enjoys going and having his extremities mashed, and out of a sense of self-preservation has ordered some padding. One day, perhaps this reporter will be on the pyramid, taking advantage of new members and inflicting pain to sell pads....

posted by Garreth at 10:43 AM

11/08/2002

Enough flattery already :  Why I oughta....Lucky me, I get to know how many people are using this site. Oh joy. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

More imitation. But by people who forget to take out the cunning parts of code which track what people are doing.
posted by Garreth at 11:24 AM

And the geeks shall inherit the earth. :  Imagine you 'earn' 80,000 GBP per year as a computer programmer. Do you A. turn yourself into a tiger man, or do you, B. buy yourself an island in Canada?

Decisions, decisions....
posted by Garreth at 9:23 AM

Beatlemania :  I felt a total fan today, when I went in a shop at 9am to buy a video game on the day of its release. I wasn't alone - a guy in front of me bought it too; one shop assistant quizzed him as to whether or not he was 18 years old, while another answered the telephone to tell a caller it was in stock. Aliens really must have stolen my brain.
posted by Garreth at 7:45 AM

Oooh, oooh, click me, click me :  It's interesting to see the difference a reference on blogger's home page can make to the amount of traffic and weird emails you get. Keep them coming. I spent a fair while in the last fortnight trying to work out why strangers were spontaneously telling me about their childhoods. Then I saw that I'd asked people to do so on the side of my site. That's when I thought about asking people to send me gifts and money.
posted by Garreth at 7:42 AM

11/06/2002

I love Google. :  Google is evil.
It does for memory what calculators do for mental arithmatic. My memory hates google.
posted by Garreth at 6:43 AM

I am that fish :  Ass-kicking lesson with Wu Shu Kwan school fails to turn into a scene out of an Eastern martial arts movie. Student saved from disappointment by being bludgeoned by other students.

I love sparring. As a beginner, I enjoy the other students letting me kick them while they don't move too much. Like kicking fish in an empty barrel. (The water would slow your feet down) After a few rounds last night, the instructors turned brutal, and started punching and kicking back. It might have been for a number of reasons:

• I was getting a bit excited and in danger of dislocating my hip; my mind hadn't caught up with the fact that my body can't do all the imaginative things that it wants to.
• I was in danger of injuring myself unless someone did it for me.
• Paired with the same instructor twice, I took the opportunity before bowing to taunt him "You want some more, eh?" Apparently that's not proper etiquette.
• One instructor asked me to punch him, but I kicked him instead - my use of the element of surprise might have hurts his ribs a bit

Nice weather for lame ducks - only losers take the bus :  Like to live vicariously? On the edge? Tired of waiting at bus stops in the rain? I know I was until I discovered playing bus stop chicken. The rules are simple, and whatever happens, everyone is a winner. If you approach a bus stop manned with people, and you don't fancy hanging about, getting cold in London, try walking to the next bus stop. If you hear a bus approaching, don't run to either stop, but stay in the inter-stop no-man's land. Keep walking, ignoring the bus loading with wet passengers, and the small children watching through wiped curves in the steamy windows. When the bus departs towards the next stop, turn and make eye-contact with the driver. Try to maintain a firm but friendly glare, and raise one finger slightly to indicate that you wish to board the bus. See if the bus stops, but whatever you do, don't run, or look too needy.
posted by Garreth at 3:21 AM

11/05/2002

Sending unsolicited gifts is the greatest form of flattery :  Imitation is good, but don't let that stop you sending gifts. And if you are going to copy my layout, please remove any code which confuses blogstats, the thing which tells me who my loyal and devoted fan base is.
posted by Garreth at 1:33 PM

Pot Pourri :  Makes me think of toilets now. Doesn't make me think of fresh mountain air.
posted by Garreth at 12:35 PM

Luddites Unite :  Ever had one of those "I hate new technology" moments? Ever dreamed of clawing back a little at the relentless march of new toys? You need a cell phone, but don't want a small and shiny colourful one which can send you pictures from your fridge and restock it at the same time. You looked at getting a Fisher-Price walkie-talkie and embedding a Nokia inside the plastic casing, but it was too expensive. Look no further. You can now get the phone that Patrick Bateman had in American Psycho. The Motorola Ultra. Reconditioned. It's all 1980s gravy.
posted by Garreth at 9:10 AM

11/04/2002

Sick or not, you should get out more, boy :  I left my new toys in the lounge, on one of my many trips to the bathroom. Imagine how surprised I was to find Michael Jackson talking to my gingerbread-man when I returned to the room. He was soon joined by Britney's Pears, but then something terrible happened, which caused the celebs to flee. Craig David started eating his way out from within the gingerbread-man, starting to nosh at his head. It ended horribly. I think I should start drinking booze again, and get out of the house on the weekend.
posted by Garreth at 5:34 AM

Here comes sickness, walking down my street :  Things to do when you're sick:

• Stay at home
• Get someone to buy you a Playstation 2 and bring it round
• Watch movies by foreign directors
• See how much water you can drink in a day
• Make furniture out of pieces of wood you find around the house - especially if generations of tennants have used your loft as urban landfill
• Invite Craig David round
• Eat gingerbread men
• Pee about 20 times a day

11/01/2002

Haloween on Uxbridge Road - Fab Fish Bar Fight :  Halloween, feeling ill. A kind of self-pitying ill, where you huddle under your duvet, and beg for chocolate from anyone passing. A movie seemed like a top idea, a way of hiding in the darkness of a lounge, whiling away the hours. Maybe a bit of food - some green vegetables for the vitamins and that. Self-pity descended further, the fish and chip shop beckoned, and vitamin grease was to replace vitamin greens. And sod the movie, watching the ghouls pass on Uxbridge road was entertainment enough.

Uxbridge Road - not too shabby an area of London. I've only seen one appeal for witnesses to murder this month, and no-one had been shot on Uxbridge Road for several months. And its almost a year since the last shoot-out in a chicken restaurant.

I stroll into the shop, a couple of geezers waiting in front. The bike of one of them partially blocked the door to the shop.
"Sensible not letting such precious vehicles out of sight", I think to myself. The younger guy gets his chips, the taller guy starts wise cracking. The young guy was starting to ignore the tall guy's rant about not being able to get change for a twenty pound note. He starts ranting in my direction. As he does this, I notice he's looking a little frayed around the edges - his jacket has a few rips, and his face bears evidence that it has born a few rips in its past. I figure its wise to make sympathetic noises to his loud, brash, patter. Tall guy seems wired on something - figure it can't be stimulants or he wouldn't have been asking for fried potato slices in a paper bag.

I order a spring roll to accompany my larded spud slivers, as a staggeringly drunk man staggers into the wheel of the bike in front of the door.
"Forkin knock yuse bike, up that roard," is the line he decides to deliver, as he lurches to the counter.

It's worth taking the time to drink in the look of people like this. He has the seasoned gut of a semi-professional drinker; perhaps he was runner-up in the qualifying rounds of a drink-off. The winner probably got a lucrative sponsorship deal from Guinness, whereas the confused staggerer in this chip shop was doomed to a life as an 'almost ran'. A 'might have been'. A man who had to pay for his beer, and was full of malice for the world. At any rate, he'd probably been on a bit of a marathon session, as he came to be beside me, holding onto the counter with both hands at 7:30pm. His face was flushed, and he had dark rings below the reddened eyes that were sunk deep into his face.

The staggerer was mumbling half words and syllables with too many 'r's in, as the tall guy, looked round.

The tall guy made it quite clear that he would not appreciate anything happening to his bike.

The staggerer retorted something about the bike being in the way, and that the likely destination for this bike was "up the forkin roard."
In hindsight, I spotted a bit of a theme to the conversation. Each participant would say something to the other, then fail to listen to the answer he got, and repeat his earlier rota of statements.

To spare you the details of repetition, the chip shop assistant would repeat to me that the staggerer was drunk.
The staggerer would cycle through his phrases of,
"Fork arrf", "Forkin prick", "Just a gettin sum grub".
The tall man, after taking off his torn jacket, would explain,
"You should learn to shut your marf", "You touch my fackin bike, and Arll put you in the fackin road, mate, and you wont fackin ged up arfter", "Ahm tired uv people givin me shit awl the fackin time"
I had empathy for the tall guy - no man should mess with another man's bike, or even threaten to.

At one point during the cycle of phrases, the young guy tried to restrain his partner in imminent crime, as he started towards the staggerer. The two men squared up, and the staggerer turned from the counter, managing to face the man, thrusting his legs to the side like Douglas Bader to steady himself, and thrusting his hips and his chest forward. I assume that he thought this made him look threatening, while still allowing him to stand upright. Even if he did sway slightly.

The tall guy now retreated outside, and his patter now moved to,
"Come artside, and we'll see who's smart, then, big-marf"

I paid 1.85 GBP for my tasty meal in greasepaper, and salted and vinegared it. The tall man was outside and had put down both his jacket and his own tasty carbfest. He was looking more wired than ever, and in his t-shirt, you could make his wiry frame. The veins on his arms were bulging out, and his eyes were burning with barely controlled rage. As I passed him, I figure he's about an inch or two taller than me, not as tall as I'd thought - maybe 6 foot 2 inches. I decided to pass on the movie rental, and persevere with Halloween outside the Fab Fish Bar, deciding to get a ring side stand by the bus stop. I've watched a fair bit of violence - Muay Thai, boxing, ultimate fighting - but I've never eaten at the same time. So this threatened to push back the boundaries of experience for me.

For some reason, the staggerer emerged outside of the shop empty handed - all the bitterness at having lost the Guinness sponsorship must have been gnawing at his brain for years, he didn't move or think too quickly.

As the tall guy's foot connected with the side of his head, his physical presence in the world crashed back to him. He wasn't down for long, only falling to a squat against the wall of the shop. It had been a graceful and fast move by the tall guy, but he lost several points with the assembled judges at the bus stop, by following the kick by a spectacular fall to his own arse. The noise of foot on head was slightly higher pitched than one would expect - a mighty thocking sound.

Both men shot up, the tall guy faster but with further to get up. They were fully upright at about the right time, and the tall guy went in with a punishing right hook, the staggerer staggering to his own right. A quick left jab, roundhouse right from the tall guy met little resistance from the staggerer. The noise was again quite crisp, and one can only imagine the swelling knuckles of the tall guy with such clean connections.

Sensing that there was no real chance of losing more than the skin of his knuckles to this unworthy opponent, the tall guy started to taunt his foe.
"Not so smart now, ey? Not gonna be fackin abart wiv my bike now, eh? Wots up eh? Nufin to say?"

One can only imagine that the staggerer, now the slumper, had decided at this point to trot out one of his three phrases, as the tall guy suddenly backed up, planted a right foot right in his face, and followed it up with a brief flurry of downward punches.

The tall guy stalked back to his coat and chips, took them in hand and cycled off down the road shouting about people "Givin me fackin grief arl the fackin time."

Within a few seconds, the staggerer was up again, blinking confused into the middle distance, with blood trickling from his mouth and nose. Not gushing like you'd expect.

He was like a fish pulled out of the water, after the hook is removed, all the fight gone. After you put them back in the water, they float for a while before coming to their senses, and darting back into their comfortable underwater camouflage.

Just like a fish coming to his senses, the staggerer (now slumper) returned to his staggering, and blended into the night. I wondered if he'd get hooked again that night.
posted by Garreth at 12:08 PM

House Sitter Available :  Do you have a penthouse flat in London that you're afraid to leave empty? Were you planning to go away, but can't bear the idea that your rooftop swimming pool will be left idle? For a small fee, and the use of your bicycle, I can persuade an experienced house sitter to swim in your pool and live in your flat. Trust me.
posted by Garreth at 3:52 AM