Why do all American women and kids talk like they’ve been eating Helium?
Category: Observation
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Best birthday card ever!
My reputation majestically sweeps before me. This is undoubtedly the best card I have received. Ever! I’m welling up. -
Who the f**k are they?
Have you noticed the abnormal amount of time the media (and, it seems to me, the BBC in particular) gives to the American Presidential election? The whole process takes about a year and has only just started.
Expect screens to be bombarded almost weekly with ‘news’ of banal ‘candidates’ with zero charisma and cheesy grins as wide as Alaska all fighting for their 15 minutes of fame before fading back into obscurity from whence they came. Presidential ‘hopefuls’ with unfeasibly stupid names such as Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. Who? Exactly. Never heard of them, probably never will again.
Why do I need to know this? We get enough bullshit politics on the news now. I don’t need the imported version as well.
God bless America.
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Standard fitting? My arse!
So, the extractor hood in the kitchen dies. Off we go down to the electrical store to get a replacement. There’s a nice shiny replacement available for a reasonable price. On the box it says ‘Standard Fitting’, which I naïvely mistook for ‘old hood comes down, new hood goes in its place’.But no.
Now, if I’d been writing the instructions in the manual, they would have gone something like this…
- Remove old unit (the easy bit)
- Due to EU regulations, your nice new cooker hood has a moulded plug which must be cut off in order to get the wire through the existing hole in the kitchen unit. This can be done in about half an hour by pushing the wire between the wall and unit and then trying to tease the end trough the hole using a wire coat hanger (shouting and swearing optional).
- Offer the new unit up into the space left by the old unit. You may find that your new hood is less deep than your old one and therefore the kitchen tiling will not cover the wall immediately underneath. If this is the case, tough titty.
- Gently ease the unit up into the space so that the exhaust vent protrudes through the existing hole cut in the kitchen unit. You will find that our vent is 1/2″ larger than the old one and you will have to enlarge the hole with a jigsaw you don’t fucking own. By this time you may find that the hood is getting too heavy to lift and will have to drop it and start from No.3 above.
- Once you have bought/borrowed/stolen a jigsaw that you will probably never use again in your pathetic life, repeat points 3 and 4. You will now find that due to the fact that we fucked you about with the diameter of the outlet, your existing flexible ducting diameter is 1/2″ too small. You now have two options: a) Rip existing ducting out and start again with proper diameter, or b) Bodge the end of existing ducting using pliers, Stanley knife and copious quantities of Gaffa tape in order to make it fit.
- By this time you may find that the hood is getting too heavy to lift and will have to drop it and start from No.3 above.
- Now that you have made the join of your vent and flexible ducting resemble a cow’s fucking udder in order to make it fit, resume from point 3, omitting points 5 and 6.
- Once you have managed to locate everything into position (estimated time wastage – approx. 3 hours), you will notice that we have drilled our mounting holes at least an inch away from where the old ones were. This is to mainly piss you off.
- By this time you may find that the hood is getting too heavy to lift and will have to drop it and start from No.3 above.
- Due to point 8 above, you will now have to drill new mounting holes through your kitchen unit. It is noted that due to it’s physical size, you will not be able to fit your power drill into the space available. We recommend you buy/borrow/steal a smaller drill or do this manually.
- By this time you may find that the hood is getting too heavy to lift and will have to drop it and start from No.3 above.
- Once you have drilled the mounting holes, you may use the provided bolts to secure the unit in position.
- Installation is complete. You will now find that the kitchen unit door above the hood will not close due to catching on the hood. Please adjust the door hinges to suit.
- Wire a plug to the cable to replace the perfectly good one you cut off in point No.2 – you can use the one from the old (dead) cooker hood.
So that’s it. Piece of piss!
All that was left was to switch it on, which I duly did and… it didn’t work. Hmmm, what could be the problem? Fuse? I changed the fuse and the hood fired up.
The moral of this tale is… check the fucking fuse first.
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Dead lazy…
Dead bird found in bag of salad? Here’s an idea – buy some salad stuff fresh off the market and make the fucker yourself. Idle git! -
Hats off to the Tributes
Now I know I’m best at being grumpy, but I do like a good larf now and then, believe it or not.
I recently listened to Rick Wakeman on his Planet Rock radio show, on which there was a request for listeners to phone in to the show with the funniest names for Tribute bands. Some of these had me in stitches, so before I forget them, I thought I’d share with you here.
First up, a couple of ordinary but clever ones:
Then some where they are named after the band’s frontman:
- Fred Zeppelin
- Matt Loaf
- Jef Leppard, and the brilliantly named
- Simply Reg
Then a selection of foreign tribute bands:
- French Kiss
- Colorado Beatles
- Argentina Turner
- LA Doors
- Boston Stranglers
- Dieppe Purple
- Islamabad Company
- Iran Duran
- Bat Out of Hull
Then the best of them all, an Ike and Tina Turner tribute named… ‘I Can Turn a Corner’
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Euroshizen.
Jedwank? Bluech? Fuck, it must be Euroshizen time again. I’m off out for a pint.
Why is it named Eurovision anyway? Surely it should be Eurosonic or Eurosound. Bloody misleading if you ask me!
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Twat!
A couple of nights ago I watched a boy, maybe 7 or 8 years old, kicking an empty bottle around the pavement, while (presumably) his mother watched on in silence.
The bottle predictably fell into the gutter and smashed. “You fucking twat!” shouted the mother. I couldn’t have put it better myself.
What a wonderful society we have become.
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Personal service lives!
Apparently I was wrong about personal service in my last post. So much so, the BBC is making a series about it – ‘Michel Roux’s Service‘. I’ve just seen a preview clip of it and OMG! does it look exciting!
That last bit was sarcastic.
Yet another friggin’ ‘reality’ programme (about as real as Dolly Parton‘s headlamps) with a s-l-o-w, p-a-t–r-o-n-i-s-i-n-g n-a-r-r-a-t-o-r, about a bunch of no-hopers training to be waiters. OK, silver service waiters, but still waiters. Christ on a friggin’ bike! Where do they get the ideas for these programmes from?
In a real attempt to make the programme exciting, one of the participants announces “If we can do this, we can do anything”. So you’ll be able to drive an F1 car will you? Or design a viable and economical solution to replace the now obsolete U.S. Space Shuttle orbital delivery system, will you?
No, I didn’t think so. You’ll be a posh waiter.
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Personal service is officially dead.
And this is why…
My oven died yesterday and I took it to the oven graveyard (well, it probably ends up in India or China somewhere, but the local dump’s just a bit nearer for me). I go to buy a new one at Currys on the way home.
- Enter Currys for a new oven.
- Select oven No.1 – “Sorry, that’s out of stock”.
- Select oven No.2 – “Sorry, that’s out of stock”.
- Select oven No.3 (getting more expensive every time)
- Assistant: “Yes, we have 24 of those”
- Me: “Great, I’ll take one”.
- Assistant: “They’re at the warehouse, I’ll have to order it and get it delivered to you”.
- Me: “Free delivery?”.
- Assistant: “No, £22”. (Or something similar)
- Me: “Have it delivered to the shop and I’ll pick it up, I only live ’round the corner”.
- Assistant: “Can’t do that”.
- Me: “Goodbye”.
I just ordered the same oven online for £70 cheaper with free delivery. So thanks to Currys attitude today, I saved 90 quid. Cheers.
But doesn’t that reflect the state of the big stores nowadays? For example, my disappointing recent shopping experiences include:
- Currys – They don’t sell curries.
- Boots – they don’t sell boots.
- Selfridges – they don’t sell fridges.
- Virgin Megastore – well, what a fucking let down they were!
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All around the Moat
Although not basically funny, I can’t help seeing the lighter side of the search for the now infamous Raoul Moat. Half the UK’s police force, the SAS and ‘specialists’ from other countries have been looking for this one bloke for just over a week now without success. But they did find his tent.
I can’t help likening the situation with the scene from Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ where the a dozen or so Legionnaires search the PFJ’s HQ, only to find a spoon.
