predict me don't

As part of our celebration of the May Day Weekend, we decided to clear out the garage on Bank Holiday Monday. Since we moved into this house two years ago, the garage has become some kind of nether-world where things are placed in the vain hope that they will somehow disappear of their own volition. As time has gone on, it's been increasingly difficult to actually get into the garage as there are piles of boxes, old furniture, old appliances, gardening implements and general junk that seem to have multiplied asexually, like giant junk snails.
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So, with the sun shining and the kids happily arguing about who gets to be Player One on Shadow The Hedgehog in the house, we dragged everything out of the garage and into the back garden. We found boxes upon boxes of videotapes, bric-a-brac, computer junk (a box that seemed to be full of serial cables) and one box containing numerous shredded carrier bags and a plastic toy petrol tanker beside which a mouse had made a little nest. The mouse was still there and stared, panic-stricken, as I took his house to the bottom of the garden and released him with a vigorous shake into a bed of nettles.
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I was delighted to discover two boxes stuffed full of CDs. I recalled that I once made a commitment to myself to rip all of them to mp3 for storage purposes, but somehow got sidetracked when Mrs Fremescent decided she didn't want untouched cardboard boxes full of old mid-to-late 90s indie CDs cluttering up the lounge. So yesterday, in the pleasant May Day Bank Holiday sunshine, I sat on the garden bench and set to work sorting the disks into "keep" and "chuck" piles. Covermount disks from magazines were instantly relegated to the chuck pile without much any whatsoever, most of these disks contained the kind of sub-par, monotonously predictable and tedious dross that killed off my interest in music in the late 1990s early 2000s - Northside, Cast, Marion, Oasis, Sleeper, Suede - that sort of thing.
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There was one freebie disk that caught my eye, though. A 1999 covermount disk which proclaimed itself "The Best Album Of The Next Century EVER!" from an awful "futuristic" videogame menu style photoshop cover. I was intrigued and opened the case up to see whether the person who compiled it was a prescient genius who could have predicted the emergence of the new century's biggest bands like Keane, Coldplay, Muse, Lily Allen, Pete Doherty, Amy Winehouse and her clone army of "teenage girls with 50 year old black woman voices".
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Here, then is the track listing:
Terrorvision - josephine
Delirious - see the star
Vast - somewhere else to be
Space Raiders - disko doktor
Wilt - working for the man
Sound 5 - heavy transit
The Paradise Motel - hollywood landmines
A - foghorn
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Apart from Terrorvision I've heard of none of these artists, have you? So this must be the worst "best of" CD ever made. Hopefully the person who compiled this got the sack as soon as the century turned. Thing is, I'm too scared to actually listen to this... one day, when I've plucked up the courage, I'll do a review of it.

checkin

I am still here. There are things with massive consequences going on in my life at the moment, things I cannot blog about until they are done with, things that are taking up 90% of my brain power (allowing the other 10% to wonder where I put my shoes). Blogging is the least of my worries at the moment, but - as you might have noticed in the title - there's always a little time in my life to design a new header graphic.

smellen

This morning I came downstairs to find the floor was sporting its customary cat turd 2 inches from the litter tray (which is a damn sight better than the occasional 6 inch wide lake of cat piss around the litter tray). I grabbed some wipes and cleaned it up, stuffed the shitty wipes in the bin, set the litter tray outside the back door and promptly washed my hands. The stench of cat droppings diminished somewhat, but somehow still hung in the air.
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I had my breakfast, fed the kids, brewed up a cuppa and went upstairs to get myself ready for work - the smell of cat shit still hanging around. I scrubbed my hands hard with Imperial Leather, rinsed and repeated. I doused them - and myself - in aftershave. The smell of cat shit was still lurking. I checked my feet, they were clean, checked the rest of me - I was clean.
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I set off for work and the smell of cat shit was in the air. I checked the bottom of my shoes - clean.
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I got to work and the same stench was there. I checked my shoes again, checked my hands, checked my face in the bathroom mirror, checked the carpet around my desk, checked my desk, checked my keyboard & mouse. All were clean, but still this same stench of cat turd remained.
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Do I smell of this morning's cat shit or is it all in my head? Is it a stench that only I can smell? I once read a Philip K Dick novel where one of the characters suffered from a psychological condition called "Phobic Odour". He was convinced that his physical odour was repulsive to all and sundry, despite the fact that he washed himself vigourously as often as he could. For a while afterwards, I believed that I too stank the place up and took great pains to ensure I didn't offend, odour-wise (in my defence I was in my early teens and a bit of a twat to boot).
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So, have I developed a phobic odour? Damn you, Philip K Dick; damn you, our badly-aiming cat.

trike!

I was watching an old, old episode of Top Gear on the Freeview channel "Dave" last night. You could tell it was old, Jeremy Clarkson was thin and had hair. So, anyway, they ran this little segment on some three wheeled car that was designed to lean like a motorbike through corners. Richard "The Ham and Pickle Sandwich" Hammond gleefully leaned it hither and yon around loads of leafy country lanes whilst achingly hip (for about six years ago), adrenaline pumping music crashed about loudly in the background.
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I sat there thinking "who on earth - apart from an achingly hip, successful motoring broadcaster with exceptionally white teeth, a £500 haircut and money to burn - would buy such a pointless vehicle?" and as the breathlessly exciting exterior shots gave way to adrenaline-pumping in-cockpit shots of Richard "The Ham & Cheese Roll" Hammond driving, or shots from cameras mounted on the exterior of the three wheeler, a little voice in my brain started to whisper "You see that 3 bed semi he's just passed? You know that 3 bed semi. See that tree? You know exactly where that tree is... Look at the curve of that road... you know how it feels to go around that curve..." and, just as the segment ended and the now in-studio Richard "The Hammond" Hammond started burbling to Thin Jeremy Clarkson about how great a car it was to drive, I stood up and shouted "OOH! OOH! IT'S... IT'S... OUR TOWN!! THEY FILMED THAT IN OUR TOWN!!! TOP GEAR WERE IN OUR TOWN!!"
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Luckily, nearly all of the items that have ever appeared on Top Gear are available on YouTube and it was only a matter of moments before I was watching the whole thing again on the PC, pausing the action at significant moments to point out blurred trees and half-obscured junctions to my barely interested family and painstakingly explaining where exactly in town these shots were filmed. I was actually excited by the thought that Top Gear had come to my town. Once. About six years ago.
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I must get out more...

facepub

I guess it's a sign that you're getting old and out of touch when you walk past a local pub that has a large "Join Us On Facebook" poster in its window and you wonder why on earth anyone would want to either:
a. Add a pub as a friend on Facebook
b. Bother with Facebook in the first place.

health search string

So I went to the hospital this morning to have something looked at by a specialist. After I described my symptoms he scratched his head and then said "I've never heard of that in 20 years of practicing medicine." Later, after a few quite uncomfortable and apparently fruitless examinations, he turned to his pc and said "I know - we'll Google it!" and then spent 10 minutes trying different search strings to see if my symptoms popped up in the results. He then explained that the British Medical Journal had reported that Google is "getting so good" that people can accurately diagnose their own illnesses by typing in their health woes.
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Just before I left his consulting room he advised me to do some Googling myself and, if I discover any information about my symptoms, bring the info with me on my next appointment.
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It's only going to be a couple of years before everyone has a Medibot in their front room.

carded

So I called up the Credit Card company on Friday afternoon to "activate" my new "card" that had "arrived" in the "post" earlier in the day. Firstly, I had to talk to a machine and enunciate. each. number. of. my. new. card. very. very. carefully. The machine then put me through to a very strangely voiced man whose sentences always ended sounding like a question? It got quite annoying very quickly? I felt like slamming the phone down? But I didn't? But eventually I wish I had?
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Anyway, he pointed out that I didn't happen to have any Identity Theft Protection on my brand new credit card and then went to great lengths to describe to me all the horrors that await me should my identity get thefted, each of which were kind of phrased as a question. So, I would get a free copy of my credit rating, a printout of my financial details that are (apparently) freely available on the web to idle surfers, my own dedicated team of Identity Theft investigators, a special super-secret password that I use when making transactions so that retailers know it's really me (and if the password isn't given then my card company immediately send a virtual SWAT team in to swipe my card details to safety) and an identity theft case worker. If I took on this Identity Theft Protection on my card, he almost guaranteed me immunity from online fraud. Then he casually added that it was only £69 a year.
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ID Theft is supposedly - outside of a major accident, death of a loved one or severe illness - the worst thing that can happen to you, can really blight your life and knacker your credit history. It's allegedly unstoppable and untraceable and yet my credit card company has a system that can prevent it - BUT AT A PRICE.
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Recently, I overheard a conversation at work where one of my colleagues was describing how they had their identity stolen and the thief took out a massive loan against their name. Their bank is refusing to investigate and are simply threatening them with court because they are refusing to pay the debt off. Apparently the police don't want to know and some "expert" they talked to basically said that the rules and laws governing online banking are so lax that thieves can drive a stolen truck through them. It beggars belief that there are systems in place that can combat this kind of thing and yet we're being blackmailed into paying a premium for them. It's kind of like having a police force, but then having to pay them an extra monthly fee in case you get burgled, assaulted or murdered. That's the beautiful face of capitalism at it's best, I guess.
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Financial Institutions: If you can stop ID Theft, then why don't you just stop ID Theft, instead of selling it to us as an optional extra, you tight-fisted money-grabbing bastards?