Spiderman 3

Looks like there's a new trailer out for Spiderman 3. Its got me all excited in what is probably an unhealthy way.


Here's the link to the Apple Trailer page

Standing Divided

I've spent the last week or so in Edinburgh, capital of Scotland. The weather has been great and I've managed to squeeze quite a lot of tourist activities alongside my working schedule. I have however become increasingly disturbed by the apparent hatred that the Scots feel towards the English.

Followers of football (soccer to you American lot) will be aware that England is the only team from the UK to have made it through to the finals. Now I can understand if that situation means that the other nations don't want to pay as much attention to the World Cup ongoings as those countries that have made it in, but what I can't understand is the attitude towards the English as a results of us being there and them not.

If it were the other way around, I am pretty sure that I (and probably most people in England) would rally behind the Scots, or the Welsh, if they were the only teams left in the World Cup finals from the UK. In Scotland however people seem to be going to great lengths to make sure that the English that are around do not get to fully enjoy there World Cup.

My Grandad has to watch the football in his own house (he daren't go to a pub - most of which have every flag except the St. George Cross pinned up in the bar) with his curtains drawn so that his neighbours don't see his English shirt or flag. In the past (Euro 2004) he had his house egged when he neglected to do this. In the recent news a young boy and his father were physically attacked whilst jogging in England shirts and another man was beaten for having a small car flag. Of course the local police are quick to assert that these are isolated incidents and that generally there is no ill felt towards the English. I would have to disagree to a certain extent. Granted there are not that many major attacks, but small localised incidents are happening all the time - do the police really think that someone (like my Grandad) is going to report his neighbours into them for egging his house?! No - that would only fuel their anger towards him.

I admit that I'm heavily generalising the situation based on a few incidents and I'm sure - in fact I know - that there are a lot of good natured Scots out there who don't have any problem with the English. In fact, as an example, only the other day my Grandad was in the local JJB sports shop to buy his new England strip and the guy at the counter lightly joked to him that if he kept the tags on then he could come back and get a full refund when England lose!

Its just disappointing that the few ignorant people have to ruin the atmosphere for the rest and make it appear that the UK can't stand united in any cause that the individual nations are persuing.

Rankled by Rankers

Rankers, it seems, are starting to irritate me. By my definition a ranker is a low form of parasite that attempts to ride the internet surf with complete disregard for those who are simply wishing to use the internet for the furtherment of that ultimate goal of intellectual understanding.

To my newly found shame, several of my office colleagues have recently become rankers. They are not the "in you face" kind of ranker - which to be frank is a relief on an unfathomable scale. Instead they are more of the sublter and quieter persuasion that almost hide their ranker-like qualities completely behind devious facades - weaving a clever web of deceit to appear to be genuinely unaware of their very own rankerness.

All that I can do is beg, nay demand, to rankers everywhere to reconsider your evil rankering ways and put a stop to this perverted subversion of internet traffic.


You know who you are. Don't make me shame your very existence.

Bloody Students? Damn Villagers more like!

I'm a student - so I think I'm allowed to have a rant about them every now and then - aren't I? Well I think so, and I often do have said rants... often with other fellow students. In fact I look forward to the end of Summer term so that I know that I can have 3 months of getting a coffee and sandwich at lunch time without ridiculously long queues. Bloody students.

However, having said that I will be one of the first to start a conversational complaint about students in general, I do take offense when non-students do it. What makes it even worse is when it is completely unfounded or uninformed.

A prime example of this is the ongoing (and probably everlasting) friction between the local communities surrounding my University and the student population that is pretty much forced to reside there. For some reason they (the locals) take every opportunity to complain about us (the students). These compaints range from the noise we make when we leave the function nights and pubs, and all the general rowdy behaviour associated with young adults at University.

My first point to these local community complainers is that its not as if the University just appeared overnight... its been here for a very long time and so why did they move to an area with a University in it in the first place?!?

Secondly, I don't think they fully appreciate the economy and growth that the students bring to the area. I seriously think that there should be a population sign on the way into the area that says something like "Population: 11342 term time, 5000 otherwise".... house prices in this area are ridiculously disproportionate to nearby towns. Why? Because everyone wants to own a house near a University so that they can rent it out at amazingly high prices to the Students who have nowhere else to go!

Anyhow, I could go on about their inconsistent and misinformed stances on the student population for a long time... but I think the worst thing I've seen or heard about this in quite a while is a Village Residents Leaflet that was recently posted through the letterbox of every single house in the area (yes, including Student rented properties) that was giving advice on all sorts of matters such as when the association of residents meets up, who to contact in the local police force, taxi numbers, etc... oh.. and it also had a "Student Disturbances" section which read:

To report any type of anti-social behaviour, litter, abandoned vehicles, begging, etc. please contact....

Begging?!!? What the hell? How bloody ridiculous and immature to even think that we go around begging. The students at this University are actually quite affluent on the scale of things!

Well, I'm thoroughly peeved at the moment so I'm off to go and beg (apparently) for some scraps of food to cobble together some semblance of lunch.

Mr. Demotivator

I came across quite a funny demotivating web site quite a few months ago - Despair, Inc. Now that I've started to write up my PhD thesis I have been seriously considering buying one of their fine products - it seems quite fitting given my general state of motivation at the moment.

Initially I was thinking of buying the demotivator screensaver set which apparently contains 20 or so of the Despair designs and slogans. Seemed like the perfect choice as it is instantly downloadable... the only problem is that it seems to be available only for the Windows platform. I might E-mail them and ask them about a Mac OS X version.

Perhaps they assume that a Mac user is impervious to the effects of demotivation?

So now I'm not sure whether I should get a demotivator print such as the "Potential" slogan in the above picture... or if I should try to beat my office colleague to the post and order a "Procrastination" mug.

The mug it is - largely to be able to say that whilst I should have been working, I browsed a demotivation store and bought a procrastination mug!

Edit: I sent Despair Inc. an e-mail about the lack of their screensaver support for Macs - and suggested the reason I gave above that Mac Users must be too content to get down about things. Here's their response:

Hello John,

Actually, you're exactly right -- Mac users are too satisfied with their competent, reliable OS to actually get Despair's brand of cynical humor. But we might be introducing a Mac version of the screensaver in the coming months; I guess for all the people who've had trouble downloading songs from iTunes, or who can't keep up with what wild cat the OS is named after this month. So keep your eyes peeled (not literally)...

Thanks,

Mike S.
Despair, Inc. Customer Service

Foot, inadvertently placed in mouth

Sometimes it just happens that way. I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one who at least makes an attempt to try to think about what I say before I say it. This, I think, is one of the most important lessons we can learn from our parents, friends, and laughing stocks of the school. Several instances immediately stick out in my mind - examples of when I let my mouth run away from my brain and suffered the consequences... with sometimes mentally-scarring side effects. Take one such example: Me, aged 10, at junior school. Already the teacher's pet in the class and already being ridiculed for that status - amongst other things (such as "mushroom-style" side parting). I should have been watching my every word, but no... one rainy afternoon during a maths class I looked up from my work and asked the teacher for some help with something.... unbidden, without hesitation and loud enough to be heard throughout the class came the words "Dad, can you tell me how..."

Too late. Too damn late had I noticed my mistake. Its an easy mistake to make, but for the rest of my time at that school I suffered dearly for that foot that I oh so easily placed into my mouth.

There was an upside to this incident though... I learnt my lesson - and now its only on very rare occasions that I let something so embarrassing slip. Having said that - I can't be sure if this is because I'm better at thinking first.... or if its just that I'm not so easily embarrassed. Recently though, I seem to have been relapsing. Mainly, whilst talking to my girlfriend I'll say something that sheds some light on my ignorance of a subject - something I'm incredibly careful at not doing. Luckily she's forgiving (and indeed soon forgets) the incidents.

Some "incidents" however are of the more subtler cases of "foot in mouth" whereby you say something, but you have thought it through... only to find that your processing of that thought was fundamentally flawed. Take this recent conversation I had in the rather touchy subject of toilet habits (always a topic that should be thought through very well before commenting on or joining the conversation!):

After several minutes of discussions on toilet etiquette I thought it was reasonable to broach the subject of toilet paper and substitutes thereof. Bearing in mind that we had all just been talking about issues that are probably normally considered polite taboo for over-coffee social chats I considered my chosen subject carefully - emergency toilet paper. I figured that it must have happened to everyone, you've run out of toilet paper and not noticed until too late. There's no one else in the house to come to your rescue, but you happen to be reading (or have for general reading material) a newspaper. Paid for or free - it doesn't matter. So do you use that for a substitute?

Nope. Apparently that's just me. Oh dear. Too late - now my friends are looking at me in a slightly different light and the conversation has very definitely gone from "cheery taboo breaking" to "now you've gone a bit to far, you wierdo"... Once again I've gone and said something that unwittingly turned out to be embarrassing - but this time because I assumed I wouldn't be the only one to have done this in my group of friends.

One day I shall learn to successfully navigate my way through the pitfalls of self-humiliating conversations. On that very same day however, I imagine I will have been marooned on a desert island devoid of people to embarrass myself in front of.

Customers who bought this item also bought...

I just had to do it. After finding the various links for my previous post my attention was drawn to the Ann Summers link...

I found it interesting that the woman in the picture was carrying some kind of travel case. Scan down to the bottom of the page and you find that customers who bought this outfit recently bought a Clit Kit that looks rather like the case in the picture. Take a quick look at this item and you see that customers also opted for Fresh Wipes and Slide and Ride....

Which to choose?!? Well Fresh Wipes is a dead end, so Slide and Ride it is. This brings up only a single choice of the Twisteralla... and then whats that?!? Fresh Wipes?!?

How does that happen? How are Fresh Wipes linked to by Twisteralla but not the other way around? Strange.

Anyhow... you can keep on doing this for quite a while.... but I imagine that you'd usually you end up with the common denominator of batteries. High power and long life probably.

Where are all the Beautiful Air Hostesses?

OK - this is something that's been bugging me for the last few years now. As part of my PhD I end up traveling an awful lot (for a student that is) but I have yet to see one single bloody specimen of a good looking and YOUNG Air Hostess!

Note the capitalised YOUNG in that sentence. Is it just on the flights that I take, or are all Air Hostesses nearing retirement age? Surely there is going to be a worldwide shortage if it carries on at this rate....

Stereotypically, an Air Hostess is seen to be a young and good looking woman (please see above photo. Several times if necessary to get the idea) .So much so in fact that it even features quite high up in adult fantasy dress genre! Apparently this stereotype came from (or at least was fuelled by) Donald Bain's "Coffee, Tea or Me? The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses". I think that Donald should be reprimanded for raising false hopes of millions of air travelers.

On second thoughts though it may be that I had been traveling with the wrong airline....


Hooters Air ran for a short while with the idea of specifically jazzing up the air hostesses image.... unfortunately it didn't take off very well. Shame that. Maybe it was something to do with people not taking them seriously....

God damn crappy roads

No - I don't mean roads of raw sewage that are subject to eternal damnation... although its close. I'm talking about UK roads. A policeman following me into work today (and indeed any day in any direction) could be forgiven for thinking that I was a drink driver. In reality, however, this is far from the truth - I never drive even when I've had a drink and know that I'm under the limit! So why would I be perceived as being drunk?

God damn crappy roads. That's why! The state of UK roads (at least in my area) is pitiful - and in fact full of pitfalls, potholes, sunken drains and poorly laid joins on newly laid tarmac. My car doesn't respond well to these tarmac monsters - its a sports car with very stiff suspension and very low profile tires. Now let me clear something up - I'm not a chav or a boy racer and so my car isn't purposely altered to be this way... its just the way it is - just like a 4x4 8 seater 5 litre Off road utility vehicle being used in London is what it is (useless and overkill).

Anyway - there's no way to avoid these dreadful roads and so I end up having to snake my way through them driving my car very much as if I'm competing in some sort of slalom competition. Hence why I end up looking like a drunk. I'm just waiting for the day that some upstanding copper comes along and pulls me over and reads me my rights. Unfortunately I'm unable and unwilling to change my driving habits - I've already had to replace one wheel due to damage to the rim from potholes, and I've lost count of the number of tires I've had to replace because of pinching as they ride down into a sunk drain.

I think there can only be two solutions:

1. Lend my car to the Minister for Transport for a year and laugh wickedly when he suffers from back pains after a week and goes into debt from buying new wheels/tires/suspension parts.
2. Fit satellite positioning equipment in my car and record my movements every day for a year. Then send my results to the appropriate Government authority. They can then extrapolate the positions of road defects by looking at my zig zagging trajectories.

Apparently a road condition survey is done every year... last year's survey said we're on the up and up as far as defects go. I think they're kidding themselves.