Curiousities

Want to see what the oddest articles posted on Wikipedia are? Well, this is where you can find them.

My favourite is a list of short actors.

Roy Keane, The Musical

Wow. Roy Keane, the Musical. The man who took swearing to a new level with his request to Irish team manager Mick McCarthy to stick it up his bollocks. Wow. Get me tickets. Now. What a guy.

All this, and last night Newsnight went weird. In a segment about dry-land-avoider Ellen MacArthur, the presenter referred to her boat being sponsored by DIY giants B&Q by saying that she'd already undergone more trauma than most could cope with by spending 71 days in B&Q, and then talking about how posh the pastime is talked about the 'have-nots and the have-yachts'. The longest interview was with the woman from Dead Ringers who spends her time making fun of MacArthur. Ah, to be British is to mock those who strive to achieve. Although as her achievement seems to be not to have noticed that the quickest route from Falmouth to Falmouth is staying put, I think it puts her too close to Richard Branson in the shit forms of transport stakes. It's about as heroic as a man unicycling from Land's End to John O'Groats. Remember people: we beat David Blaine. We must use our power of ignoring pointless feats of endurance. They're only looking for attention.

My Perfect Cousin

Paying quarter attention to Radio 1, which I'm sure is the most most people can muster, they seem to be playing old songs, including at least two plays of The Housemartin's 'Happy Hour'. It's like Virgin Radio, in other words.

However, this gives me a good hook on which to hang one of my hobbyhorses (RSPCA please note: this is just a metaphor. I do not condone in any way the mismaltreatmentisation of animals). One of my favourite couplets ever comes from The Undertones' 'My Perfect Cousin'

His ma bought him a synthesiser/
Got the Human League in to adviser her

Has a pop reference in a pop lyric ever been as good as this?

No. It hasn't.

House Hunting

Taking a rather more personal tack today, I thought I'd let you know about the exciting house hunt we went on yesterday. Warning: Names will be dropped. Take heed.

We're moving out of the house we've lived in for the past three and a half years, affectionately known as 'the old shithole', hopefully into somewhere with a kitchen that can be measured in square metres and a landlord who doesn't employ Laurel & Hardy's heirs to perform home repairs. We're taken by a disarmingly honest-seeming letting agent to see the flat owned (and previously lived in) by HANNAH. From S Club. This was very exciting. Nice toilet, broken stair, horrible shelving in the third bedroom. We're not going to move in though, more's the pity.

Then (anticlimax ahead), we went to see a dump that smelt like the bin behind a fast food restaurant, where the person who'd furnished the place was either an arch-ironist, wrapping themselves in layers of camp and kitsch and rolling about on the floor in their own self-satisfaction, or they'd just done it on the cheap from an Eastern European detention centre. We politely said no to that one, too.

Then we were shown to a flat on the top floor, about which the overbearing estate agent in the office all but reached orgasm. We had to go in a lift, and it was very brown, so the signs were good for me. It had roof terraces on all 3 sides, great views of london, the hugest front room you'll ever see, imacculately decorated, a dishwasher, was owned by an ex-member of the Bill, and it had 2 large bedrooms and one box room, so we couldn't have it. Arrgh. It was gorgeous though. We were all sizing up the room, trying to push on the walls to see if it could be made any larger, but it was about the size of a double bed, so no go. The suggestion was made that we turn one of the larger bedrooms into a dorm, with bunks, but we had to admit to ourselves that we couldn't live there. Boo.

And then we saw a very nice house that we might go for, but no celebrities were connected with it, so I won't bore you with the details.

Two hours forty-five minutes until the weekend. What a service I provide.

Toilets

Another of the strange signs that has popped up at work recently is this one. It indicates that on this floor there are toilets for able-bodied males and females, and facilities for those disabled in seagull attacks.

The Internet is a Strange Place...

...but only as strange as the people who inhabit it.

Yesterday someone arrived at this blog having typed

bill murray sweating

into yahoo.com

It's a good job I'm a liberal live-and-let-live it-takes-all-kinds whatever-floats-your-boat kind of guy, really. I hope he/she got what they were looking for, but I suspect not. If so, sorry. I'll try and get some pictures of Bill Murray sweating for you all to look at, because the customer is always right, even when weird.

Nerd Up!

Right. Here's a link to some variably funny imaginings of functions to be included in future versions of Windows. You've probably all thought of funnier ones yourself. Ah, the joyous nerdy conversations I've had where we've imagined the inner life of the MS Help paperclip. He's a funny wee fella. Always so helpful though. I think he gets a hard time of it. The XP dog though. I don't trust him rooting round my computer. I suspect he chews on my files.

To show how easy this is, here's mine

Why I Am a Git

Well, not why exactly. More like How I Am a Git.

Whenever I give out telephone numbers, I give them out as 020 7123 4567, keeping the 020 dialing code separate. Whenever anyone repeats it back to me or has a problem understanding that 020 is the dialling code, and the 7 at the start is part of the actual telephone number, and needs to be dialled, this sort of thing goes on in my head: "0207 is not, I repeat, not the dialling code. Try and dial 123 4567 and see what you get. We've had it for long enough, get used to it, slowcoach. Why am I wasting my time on this person? Argh." As I said, Git.

I could never live in America. I think I'd like to, sometimes, but I'd get mad whenever anyone referred to a band as a singular ("I think Maroon 5 is getting better with every release", although that's a bad example, because although it obeys gramatical rules, it makes no sense, like Chomsky's "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously") instead of as a plural ("Maroon 5 are shit", say). I know it's just the British way of phrasing it, and I shouldn't prickle and get visibly annoyed when I hear or read the American way, but I do, because, as I mentioned, I'm a git. Also, to me the American way makes it sound as though the band is some kind of separate entity in law, like a corporation, rather than the communal group of individuals that the British way makes it sound. But I'm still a git.

I am pschologically incapable of going into a toilet and seeing toilet paper that has been hung incorrectly:

without taking it off and remedying the situation by returning it to the correctly hung paper-outwards position:

It matters not whether I'm at home, in someone else's house, or in a restaurant toilet. This is eccentric, certainly, but the curmudgeonly aspects of the behaviour lend more weight to my central contention that I'm a git. Such a git, in fact, that I'm blinded to the fact that a unicycling captain chimp weilding a cosh is sitting atop my toilet paper in the first example, which anyone else would find terrifying, but I'm more concerned with the hanging of the paper.

Git.