Raisin Wheats, My New Breakfast Fear-eal

My breakfasts just got a whole lot more soul-curdlingly terrifying. I decided to switch from Special K (which features aspirational air-brush renderings of the womanly curves I could hope to achieve if I chomp my own weight in the stuff) to Kellog's Raisin Wheats. I didn't look closely enough when picking it off the shelf and now I have to look at this every morning. The anthropomorphic embodiment of the cereal is known as Mr Wheat ("May I call you Wheaty?" "NO! I AM MR WHEAT! ADDRESS ME AS SUCH!") and looks like the trunk of a particularly knarled ancient oak. He appears, sad mismatched eyes imploring, on the back of the box pleading with you to eat what can only be his children.

I think I'll have some toast.

Inexplicably Funny Cartoon and My Rendezvous in Birmingham

OK, this cartoon is the FUNNIEST THING EVER. Seriously. EVER. If anyone could actually explain it to me, I'd find it even funnier.

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Tomorrow I have arranged to meet a man that I do not know at Birmingham Moor Street station. I will only be able to work out if it is him or not because he will be in the possession of an antique French bicycle. He may even be riding the antique French bicycle, but that would be a bit rude of him, frankly, and I don't think we'd get on.

As you can probably guess, I've purchased a sexy old-fashioned racer on e-bay, and am going to pick it up tomorrow. I am even more excited about this than when the 256MB of laptop memory that I use even now to write these words arrived.

I will easily be able to recognise him because of his antique French bicycle, but how will he be able to recognise me? I was thinking about this, and have decided that the best thing to do will be to jump up and down like an exited child shouting "Bike! Bike! Bike!" until he comes over and hands over my antique French bicycle.

Zidanimation; The Day of the Flying Ants

I'm just being lazy here, as I could download the best ones and put them on this page, but instead, I'm going to direct you to SomethingAwful.com, which if you scroll through to look at the pretty pictures, you will see that lots of nerd hours have been spent creating the next AYBABTU with what I'm sure everyone's calling Zidanimations. Sadly, few of them focus on the nipple-tweak, but you can't have everything. There's a good one of a cat assassin and another good one embedding Zizou's victim in a Japanese Anime cartoon. [Edit: Actually, I've put some of the best ones up here, but still go to SomethingAwful.com because there's loads more]

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Yesterday, in my neck of the woods, was the Day of the Flying Ants. Have you had yours yet? They'll rise up against us one day, mark my words.

In Defence of Zidane

I'm sure in the fullness of time (i.e. tomorrow's back pages) the full story of what actually happened will come out, but in the absence of all the facts, I'm sticking firmly to a defence of Zizou and his rush of butt to the head. It was almost certainly in the face of extreme provocation (with at the very least a nipple-tweak, which I'd love to have seen a freekick given for, just because I've never seen a nipple-tweak free kick, and I'd love to hear John Motson say 'nipple-tweak' in a surprised voice and then do that self-satisfied 'huh' laugh of his), and at least it was a good honest bit of rage, that had no slight-of-hand, subterfuge or devious cheating skullduggery behind it, just plain simple violence, which is refreshing to see. Then again, I'm all for flogging divers, not just giving them a yellow card. Also, I'm trying to justify Wayne Rooney, and violent but honest football the world over.

If it was something racist that was said by Materazzi, I'd like to see him severely punished, because I hate Italians (note the layers of irony I work with there. Please only use such heavy handed irony under the instruction of a trained professional.).

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Radio Four lived up to all I love and hate it for this morning when a listener pointed out that technically, it wasn't a head-butt, as all butts are by definition with the head, and the 'head' of head-butt refers to the butt making contact with another head. Give the Director General another hundred grand!

Sun vs Football, the World Vs Voicemail, Me vs Meringue, the World vs Andy Murray

I now face the eternal dilemma: to watch the Germany vs Argentina game, or sit in the sun? I can't help but feel I've stretched the definition of eternal a little, but I'm still in a slight quandry.

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I'm not the only one who hates voicemail more than the Pope hates the devil. And also contraception. And Muslims. Put together. (Warning - people provide very geeky, very techy solutions here. My alternative (delete them) has the edge in the elegance stakes, I like to think.)

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Does anyone what a meringue? A student's just given me one, and I want to get it out of the way before I eat it and feel the emptiness inside that eating meringues brings. Help!

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I assume you've been following the Andy Murray Shitstorm of Scottishness controversy. English fans will presumably be supporting anybody but Andy Murray. I can see the love/hate thing continuing with this curly haired wee radge.

Why I Hate Nikki from Big Brother; Art Brut Appreciation Update; Why I Hate Voicemail More Than The Guy at the Guardian Who Hates Voicemail

I shouldn't be allowed to watch Big Brother. My hatred for Nikki turns me into a one-man angry mob, baying for blood and picking up rhetorical pitchforks and burning torches. Grr.

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It's Thursday. My infatuation with Art Brut (see below) is now over. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.

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Coincidentally, this Grauniad opinion piece about the evil of voicemails echoes a rant I made down the pub last night. I say coincidentally, but it's entirely possible that I was overheard by a feverishly short-hand writing journo and turned unwittingly into an Opinion Holder. However, his rant misses out on some of the key elements of Why I Hate Voicemail:

• Voicemail Takes Too Long. Firstly, you've got to listen to the jabber. You can't just phone them back because they don't leave their number until the end, and my sodding voicemail doesn't automatically record their number, and people always leave their number at the end of the message. I could dedicate an hour a day to going through and just noting my voicemails, without actually getting round to doing anything about them.


• Names and Numbers. People quite often don't leave these. What the blue blazing hell am I supposed to do with their message if I don't know who they are or how to contact them, I ask rhetorically, my arms milling around wildly to illustrate my oh-so-valid point.


• Clunkmail, More Like. Voicemails can't be printed out, filed, saved for posterity or anything remotely useful. They can be listened to, and then deleted. If someone gives me something useful by voicemail, I then have to write a note of it. It's like if instead of sending me emails, people wheeled their computer into my office, plugged it in and booted up, allowed me to read their message, then wheeled their computer away when I'd read it.


• Idiots Leave Voicemail. By and large, people who leave voicemails on my phone are stupid. I can attest to their stupidity primarily because my voicemail message asks them to send me an email and not leave a voicemail message. The onesimply expressed instruction I leave, and what do they do? Ignore it. Then leave a message where I can hear the drool of their stupidity drip down on to the mouthpiece as they leave messages of such monumental stupidity that I begin to question whether the human race has any kind of future without a serious cull taking place.

When will this madness end? When?

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Still, it's not all bad. I've got an official Panini World Cup sticker of Shaun Wright-Phillips in the pack I bought today. Actually, that's not true. I swapped it. Anyway, I assume this means he can play in the World Cup now, as I can't think of anything more legally binding than a sticker album, so Sven has got another attacking option. Could someone pass this information onto him? Probably the best way to reach him is to send it in a letter stapled to a leggy blonde.

Token World Cup Mention; My New Giddy Teenage Romance

Ah the World Cup. The convenient source of all my man-chitchat at the moment. Whereas before awkward talk about the weather would have filled the time between the guy in the cafe starting up his coffee machine and me leaving, now we can chat in relaxed style about the weakness in Germany's defence, the psychological state of blubbery Brazilian forwards and whether Argentina look dangerous in spite of the haircuts.

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My current short-lived enthusiastic teenage musical infatuation is, perhaps a year or so late, Art Brut who are punky, fizzy and endearingly amusing. Who could resist the couplet 'We're gonna be the band that writes the song/That makes Israel and Palestine get along'. I'd imagine they won't be overly flattered when I compare them to Sultans of Ping, and I'm not sure it's possible to sound like Sultans of Ping in a good way, but they do. I'm going to work out what the modern-day equivalent of wearing a hole through an LP, and then do it to their album 'Bang Bang Rock & Roll'.

What's Parked Outside My Work; The Robot Bill

There is a black Ford Capri parked outside my building with the engine running and a guy with shoulder-length curly blond hair, sovereign ring glistening on the steering wheel. I now know the feeling a minor character in The Sweeny must have (For reference, this feeling is: gnawing doubts to the core of my being with traces of mania in the corners, like a vicar presiding over a funeral who has secretly taken a pill.)

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By way of a Friday Frippery, I offer you a link to The Robot Bill, worth watching for the title sequence, general concept and the fact that the episode seems to be about the misappropriation of lamps.