What next, you say? Four more years? Four more years?
Oh, I imagine so. And in the meantime, there are now FOUR YEARS of archives you can dip into at will. I was going to have a few of my favourite bits here, but couldn’t find any (sad).

So there you have it, my darling doves. Four years of blogginging, and comments, and all of that stuff. I think you’re all lovely, I really do. Four years. Is that all? Still, we’ve done alright out of it, haven’t we.

Go and read some archives. Go and find something, decide it’s your favourite bit, and then we’ll know what the good bits are. I’m busy like you wouldn’t believe (andalsosadseenextpost). Back in a few days. Ish.

Big hole.
Didn’t see it.
Fell in.
Now at the bottom.
Will try to get out.
Might be a few days.
Might be less.
Or more.

Don’t need pity.
Just need Better Signage around Big Holes round here.
For goodness’ sake. It’s bloody summer. I’m not supposed to fall in holes in Summer (more light). Also, need the funny. I have lost it.

Please advise - where is the funny?
Have you seen it?
Give me links. If there are enough links, they might form some kind of chain, and then perhaps I can climb out.

What does one do for the birthday of a website?

I should never have said those nasty things about Mondays.
All the other days are ganging up on me.

Incidentally, I’ve written about one of the things I said I was going to write about, but I’ve written about it over here.
Sorry. I was determined enough for one blog post, but way too tired for two.

It’s the days, you see. They’re after me.

I can’t be doing with them anymore. It isn’t anything specific about them, it’s just the Mondayness of them. It’s wrong.

We must formulate a plan. We must do something about this horror, before it is too late (i.e next Monday). We must be proactive. We must formulate a plan.

Plan a: We will erase Mondays. No more Mondays at all. Monday? What is this Monday you speak of? From henceforth, weeks will skip merrily from Sunday over to Tuesday. This will, of course, make weeks only six days long, meaning it’s Christmas in no time at all! Gosh, this is the best plan ever. However. Tuesdays will simply become the new Monday, and we can’t erase Tuesdays as well, because CSI’s usually on on a Tuesday. We will think of a different plan.

Plan b: We will rename Monday: ‘Sunday’. While it is true that we could, essentially, give it an entirely different name, like ‘Pootleday’, this may, controversially, not improve matters. Calling it ‘Sunday’, however, would fool simply everyone into believing that it was not a different day at all, but simply the same one as the one before, but different. And better. Though I have to feel for children like myself, dragged to church in creaky shoes every week. They would have to go twice. Inhuman cruelty. Also - pubs shut early. New plan.

Plan c: We will sleep through Monday.

Plan d: We will shoot everyone. No, hang on, that is unrealistic, and also out of character. We will write a song about not liking Mondays (and shooting people), have a one-off hit with it, have big hair, chain of events etc, save Africa. Everyone will love us, world leaders will listen to us, and we will make demands of them. Eventually, because we are unrelenting and have a voice like nails against a blackboard, they will capitulate, and Make Mondays History.

Plan e: We will develop a special Monday drug. It will be a mixture of E, Speed, and Tea. We will call it ‘TEEEEEEE!‘. We will be convicted for drug invention, and go to prison, but only on Mondays - a punishment related to and fitting of our crime. In prison, they will love us, because there is a healthy class A drug culture there. They will laud us as the inventors of ‘TEEEEEEE!‘, and treat us as Gods.

Plan f: We will stop hating Mondays. I have no idea how this happens. But I suspect it might involve treats. Like Amazon treats. Or restaurant treats. Or other treats. I also suspect it is not possible.

Plan g: We will copy and paste all Mondays into a seperate file. We will work out the amount of Mondays you normally accrue over 52 weeks (52, generally), and we will make it allowable to carry your full compliment of Mondays over to the next financial year. That way, upon retirement, you can chose whether you want to a) take all your Mondays at once or b) just die early thank you very much.

Plan h: We will make ignore Mondays. Snub them. To hell with Mondays. We will maintain a stony silence toward Mondays. Mondays will be sorry they ever Mondayed us.

I am going to sleep now. Going to sleep will make the Monday go away.
And then there will be no more bad Mondays. For we have made a plan.
But, until the plan is actioned, there is still some Monday stretched out behind and ahead of me.

Going to sleep will make the Monday go away.

Part II: with the help of her beautiful assistant, little.red.boat explains the mysteries of duvet changing

You see, it’s all to do with starting the whole process inside out. With a thrust of each fist, and being careful to avoid any button-on-hair drama, the key is manouvring both right and left hands into optimum corner clutching position, on the inside of the duvet cover, which is (of course) the outside of the duvet cover, inside, because the inside is inside out. As is the outside, in.

I tell you what. With the (relative) co-operation of someone who happened to have a duvet cover on their head when I picked up the camera my beloved assistant in domestic affairs, and all other affairs for that matter, we have constructed the easy step-by-step guide the duvet changing, complete with helpful captions and everything. Click here, or on the seductive example picture below, which originally appears in the ‘try to find the corners’ section. It was quite a long section.

Sorry, I promise I’ll talk about arguments tomorrow or something. I just didn’t realise that asking people what I should write about was going to involve maths in the working out of what they said… I hate maths. Maths is all bad. All bad. Not like men with duvets on their heads. They’re all good. Unless, you know, they’re wearing it as some kind of bank robbing or bombing outfit, in which case they’re possibly quite bad.

But if they’re not in a bank, or on a tube train or anything, and have a duvet over their head - if they’re just standing in your bedroom, then they’re probably alright. Unless, of course, you don’t know them. But then, how would you know?..

Oh, just go and look at the handy cut out and keep guide to duvetcover-ing. DO NOT cut out your computer screen. You CAN keep it, though.

There are things going on. I don’t know what.
I only refer you here for up to date information, as soon as it’s available.

Three tubes and a bus.
Is this someone’s idea of a joke?

Because it’s not very fucking funny.

Go and comment on posts below. I spent ages writing those.

I promise I won’t write about television for ages. Yonks. Especially CSI. Although if you like CSI please do go and read the next post. And tell me what you thought. If you don’t watch CSI? Seriously, don’t bother. Really. Because it’s all about CSI. So you won’t like it. But those other of you will. So do. Unless you ‘haven’t', you know, seen the thing. In which case don’t.

Um. Anyway.

I promise I won’t write about television for yonks. Ages. So, you can decide. Blogging is, for me, next, about:

1) The growing list of Reasons not to smoke. Including homeless people.
2) Anna the Aggressive - arguments I’ve had. Kinda recently.
3) ‘Change your life in seven days’. Self-help hypnotism and me.
4) Biological clocks and other posts I have no intention of writing.

Let’s face it, I’ll probably end up writing them all, eventually - but for the sake of interaction (hello!), tell me which you’d like first. And, you know, if not those, then something else.

Which one? Or which order? Or what else?
And hello, obviously.
So come on… 1,2,3,4…..

Simply don’t read this if you haven’t seen the CSI Tarantino season finale and want to - because I will ruin it for you. Also, I’d pretty much advise against reading it if you have no interest in CSI at all. Because you’ll find it very, very dull.

I really really do intend to put something up about the Tarantino CSI-fest last night before it becomes completely obsolete and no one cares any more. I think it’s only fair, as I was so boring about wanting to watch it last week.

However, I was far too tired last night, far too sleepy this morning and far too, you know, ‘at work’ for the rest of the day. For most of the evening I will now be far too at the theatre to write it, but then I’ll be at home, and might actually write it. Unless I’m far too in bed.

Update: Much, much, much later

Well, I’m sitting here, and I’m trying to think of a way of doing this that doesn’t ruin it for anyone who hasn’t seen it. And then again, I’m thinking, HAHA, I’ve seen it, who cares?

I want to have a serious analysis of the events of the show, but I really don’t want to give any plot away, if I can help it. So let’s see if we can walk a fine line between the two.

Well, it was really scary when Nick was in a glass coffin, but I was really glad when he got out.

Oopses. Fine line. Tried to walk it, clearly can’t. Soz.

I was so into it.
First I was so looking forward to it, and then I was so into it. Apart from the first fifteen minutes or so. And the last fifteen. But the bit in the middle? Loved that. Or most of it. Apart from some things.

The bits that I loved:

- It was so tense. My beloved walked in just after the man blowed up, and I was sitting here, transfixed, staring at the television, immovable, with my mouth wide open.

- The lip reading. It was sentimental, moving, yet not mawkish.

- The whole ‘their watching him and trying to comfort him was actually killing him’ thing. Yes, very good.

- Quite a lot of it. The majority, in fact.

Things I didn’t like.

- Gil Grissom. I didn’t think Tarantino got him right. He was strange, too bouncy for the most part. I love Grissom. I just don’t think he was well served by Tarantino in this case. I don’t think the script played to his character, or to the actor. The things he said, the way he said them, they just didn’t seem Grissomy.

- The uber uber Tarantinosity of certain bits. The friend T put it well. I would expect him to, being a TV journalist who writes about TV in a TV magazine. And a Transvestite. Possibly. He said:

His pop culture references, outside of his own canon where they fit right in, are less of a trademark and more of a burden on the film/programme he’s contributed to. Take Crimson Tide.

In a relatively early exchange two sailors, wound up by the tense atmosphere in the submarine, end up having a fight about the Silver Surfer.

Now, fine, maybe so, but when you know Quentin’s done some script fiddling, it’s all a bit much.

So. Back to the excellent Greg and that other chap who does lab stuff and used to be in The Larry Sanders Show. They’re playing a Dukes of Hazzard game. Fascinating, althought it did allow for a bit of character exposition, which reaffirmed what we thought anyway. That lab bloke is a geek.

Then, to follow it up with Warwick and Nick talking at length about some dust up that involved a fat guy who looked like Wimpy from Popeye, was screaming, “IN CASE YOU DIDN’T KNOW, I, QUENTIN TARANTINO, WROTE AND DIRECTED THIS EPISODE.” You half expected them to start twisting, a la Pulp Fiction. On a positive note, it was nice to see how uncomfortable Nick bloke was in acting that scene. He hadn’t a clue what to do.

It was true. Half the time they may as well have been trying to Eat Quentin Tarantino the amount of trouble they were having getting their mouths around his clever clever “look at me I’m Quentin bloody Tarantino” lines. And he’s a meaty chap. You wouldn’t want to eat him and try and talk at the same time.

- The whole reasoning behind it. Just because your daughter had gone from horticulturalist to whore to a cellblock hood-rat (?) would you plan a hilariously over-elaborate revenge plan to kill just any random CSI, killing several dogs and wasting a large bag of cash in the process? Would you? Have you, in fact? Let us know.

- Little details. Niggly things. Does Grissom the entymologist really need a book to identify a fire ant, all of a sudden? If the weight differential of taking Nick out of the coffin was going to cause it to explode, would not the differential of taking all that earth off the top of the coffin make a difference? what about when all those people stood on the coffin? How was that not making any difference at all?
And was the coffin only made of glass because Nick would have blending in seemlessly if it too was made of wood? Seriously. I’ve never seen a face more expressionless. And I see dead people.

- I loved it. I really loved it, honest I did. This is just what I do to things that I watch. This is why some people don’t really enjoy watching plays/films/television with me. Because I don’t really watch things in the same way that they do. and they don’t really want to talk about it this much afterwards. They just like, you know, watching things. Oddly enough, we went to see a play this evening about critics getting murdered by an actor to whom they’d all given bad reviews.

I really did love it, though. Not as much as I thought I would, and not as much as I wanted to, but I did.

And I swear at one point someone called an actress by her actual name rather than the character’s name (Catherine’s dad. I would stake my kidney on the fact that he called her ‘Marg’ or ‘Margy’ at one point. No one else agrees with me though). And, generally, yeah. Loved it.

Sorry, I’ve written this whole thing once already, lost it somewhere in the depths of technology, have rewritten it all, and am now desperately trying to remember which incredible point of incredible spontaneous wit I topped this bit off. Whatever it was, it was very, very funny. It was a long time ago, and I’m now very tired. Insert something funny here. A ha ha ha ha ha.

In a little nubbin:

I really liked it, it had flashes of enormous brilliance, but found it to be just *too* Tarantino at several points. Also, I’m absolutely sure I spotted an enormous goof.

What did you think of it?

“Does the sound of 3,255 people biting into apples count as music?”

No, it counts as the seventh layer of hell and/or a violent reminder of
a) my bus this morning and
b) my colleague Tom.

I hate the noise of apples being eaten. Many will know this by now. Many who’ve eaten an apple near me know it for sure. I hate the noise. Hate it hate it. I hate the snap as the teeth break through the skin, and then the large scraping, and tearing noise as they cut through the flesh. And then the endless, interminable open-mouthed ‘crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch’ as they work their way through that one, first bite. Followed ad nauseum/nausea by 500,000 more bites.

So a piece of music entirely composed of the noise of 3,255 people eating apples?

I am not entirely sure if I can think of anything worse.

Chewing my own legs off at the knees?
Not worse.
Being dropped into a giant tomato from a height?
Not worse.
One person eating 3,255 apples?
Possibly worse.

Gosh, that is possibly worse, I hadn’t thought of that. Ok. The very idea of the noise of 3,255 concurrent apples may be presently turning my stomach - it actually is - but 3,255 consecutive apples?

I can’t think of anything worse.
Anything. In the world.

Unless you start taking mice into consideration.

Oh, piss.

Ok, discounting anything to do with mice - although they’re not *that* much worse, I can’t think of anything worse.

I mean, I certainly can’t think of anything worse in the whole wide world, apart maybe from mice eating apples in my pillow, while I’m locked in a small airless bedroom with several people eating 3,255 consecutive apples, while some other mice run around and scuttle and stuff.

There is, surely, nothing worse then that. Surely nothing, nothing worse.

Oh god, I have to go and sit somewhere and stare. And maybe rock, gently.

Nothing worse. Nothing worse. Nothing worse.

If I go to hell - and I would consider it, if it existed, if only as a way of avoiding evangelicals (as if That would work), then the noise described above would be my ever-loopin soundtrack.

I’m sure yours would be different.
But not worse.
No. There’s nothing worse.

With a little help from my lovely seeester and brudder-in-lore, something very little, but Previously Very Annoying has changed around the site.

Actually, no, another little thing has changed, but that was in tribute to the last person that complained about the more important little thing that has changed around the old place.

Can you tell what it is yit?

(Please note, it is not either pregnancy or the acquisition of any ‘Potter’ related book, as suggested in comments to the post below. We’ll be having *none* of those round here.)

Sunday Update

You know, I kind of forgot that I’m always making little tiny changes around here. I took away the guestbook, because all it seemed to be was a repository for spam and email address harvesting, which seemed a little sad. I change the links on my linky bit quite often, to different blogs, reflecting (although not entirely) my reading habits, and every now and again I add articles to the other bit of the sidey thing. And, yes, I may have added one of those ‘1 person online’ county things, just because I think they’re amazing, and it always makes me smile. Oooh, there’s a steam cleaner on the television. I wish I had a steam cleaner. Sorry. Attention span. What else have I done? Oh yes, also I change the rollover text on things quite often, when I can’t think of things to write.

So really, I should have just said - Meg and Po helped me fix the comment thing so that it should remember y’all, and no one need ever be put off the idea of commenting, ever again. Some people guessed that already. The tribute thing was, yes, the tagline that Mike suggested when I wanted to change it last year. Someone spotted that as well. As has Mike, actually, I’ve just noticed.

No, the thing that surprised me was the sheer level of other things people suggested that they thought had changed around here.

Apologies to Kaptain Kobold. We didn’t change the site so you get an error message every time you try and acccess it. That would be stupid. It’s just doing that of its own free will. Nothing to do with me. nononono. I didn’t break it.

Also - there have always been clouds. Always.

I’m paying slightly too much attention to the Big Brother house this year. Albeit mainly through the news section of the Big Brother microsite. I originally wrote this post last week sometime for somewhere else, but it kind of got spiked, due to - well, you know, stuff. The nomination process has also gone loopy (see here)

So four days after general orgiastic behaviour in the pool left fellow housemates thinking that Makosi and Anthony had done something entirely unhygenic in there, and three days after Makosi explicitly reassured her rompee that contrary to public opinion, they hadn’t had sex after all, Makosi announced to her closest friends in the Big Brother house that she was “90 if not 100% sure” that she is now pregnant.

I’d like to clarify first that this woman is a nurse. And to ask, perhaps, in this modern day and age, how it’s possible that she’s therefore 90-100% positive she’s pregnant, if two days ago she was equally as conviced that she hadn’t actually had sex? (And let’s face it, if you can’t tell the person you had sex with that you had sex with them, then who can you tell?)

Still, the whole thing seems quite easily explained. In fact, I think I had this kind of pregnancy explained to me quite often throughout my primary school career.

Judging by the Anthony’s impressively mature reaction to that Saturday night’s shennanigans - “The girls touched my willy and let me touch their boobs” - I think we’re looking at the lowest common denominator definition of “how to get pregnant” that we can possibly muster. Luckily, being an expert on the matter, I think I can muster quite a few…

You see, you can get pregnant by being in the same swimming pool as a boy who likes you, that’s where Makosi went wrong. Or that’s what Mandy Paxton in class five told me, anyway.

Also, you should be careful of sitting on a warm seat on the London Underground recently vacated by a man, because that can also lead to quite severe pregnancy.

Another colleague has firm memories of being told to be careful to rinse the bath thoroughly after the men had been in it in her co-educational halls of residence, and I’m sure my cousin might have said something similar to me once about toilet seats. It’s much easier then you think, you see, to catch pregnancy. Makosi (as a nurse) knows this better than all of us.

So luckily she’ll know that there are a good many things she can do to rectify the situation. Jumping off a biscuit tin, I’ve heard, is a great remedy for pregnancy. Turning around three times and then sneezing hard is also known to clear it up nicely. As is being evicted from a house with 24-hour cameras and realising that no one cares any more.

Still, who knows, it could be true. It’s the 21st century after all and there are new ways of getting pregnant cropping up all time, who needs to have sex? And it’s not like this three-day 100% pregnancy is a horrendously blatant attempt to win attention, sympathy and votes though, is it? Of course not.

Let this be a lesson to you from the Little Red Boat School of Medicine and High Jinks - avoid warm bus seats, communal pools and dirty bathtubs - and remember to carry your biscuit tin at all times.

Tescos ‘luxury toilet paper’, isn’t.

This is bad for people with hayfever.

And, you know, for other things.

Also, they charge £7 for 1kg of chicken breasts ‘to be frozen’, and £4.99 for 1kg of chicken breasts that look ostensiably the same, but are already frozen.