A few lessons in life

Whether or not it is true that Bill Gates said the following, is doubtful However, they are damn good point about how feel-good,politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

1. Life is not fair - get used to it!
2. The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
3. You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school.You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
4. If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
5. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
6. If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
7. Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
8. Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
9. Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
10. Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
11. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

New Tory Logo

I thought that Beau Bo D'or's new Tory logo was good, but Smurf has come up with another one which I think is better. Sadly, I don't have a colour scanner, but hey, you get the idea.

Trout Pout

Oh Mikey! You are so cruel, and yet so right: the new face of Nivea Lip Care

Social Exclusion

The Labour Party is hosting an evening reception at the Party Conference in Manchester, and have very kindly invited the staff who work for Labour MPs.

However, the reception is within the security cordon, which means that all those hard-working constituency staff who are still slaving away in their offices whilst their bosses are listening to the drivel from the dais, are not able to go because they don't have conference passes.

Gee, thanks.

Bitter? Me? Why yes, I am, funnily enough. Once again, those who actually do the work are excluded, or perhaps it's just another money-saving exercise - invite people who can't actually get near the venue and save a fortune on nibbles.

Have a nice time, without us, and don't spend too much time wondering why your workers are so disaffected. If you haven't figured it out by now, you never will.

Heart in Mouth

This morning, as I was driving to work, I heard a police car coming up behind me. The whole queue of traffic pulled over to the left to let the vehicle through and I was pleasantly surprised to see the message 'Thank You' being flashed on the LED screen in the rear windscreen. 'Nice touch' I thought.

A few moments later, a car stopped about four cars in front of me, indicating to turn right. I glanced in my mirror and saw a bike coming up the outside of the traffic and he didn't appear to be slowing down. The car turned right, the bike slammed on, I held my breath and was relieved when the bike did actually manage to stop under control, about 2 feet away from the car.

Observation. It's a very useful technique, better used well in advance...

No shit!

A certain large organisation has written to my boss, to express their concerns about a funding defecate of £1.4m.

For that price, my friends and I will be more than happy to supply!

I wonder if we should tell them to stop using 'autocorrect' on their wordprocessor? It took me about two hours to stop laughing.

Flying hamster

Get well soon Richard, your fans are missing you already.

not such a smart move

OK, I admit it. A tube of smarties (or these days, a hexatube, since they ditched the tube last year), doesn't last very long in my hands, and I'm not averse to eating more than one packet at a time. However, now that Nestlé have decided to switch production from York to Hamburg, I have decided to stop buying them. My little boycott may not make much difference in the grand scale of things, but I think it's another great loss to UK industry.

Nestlé is a Swiss company which bought out Rowntree's of York in 1988, so what did we expect? It's about time that UK employment law was tightened up to the same levels as it is in Europe, and make it more difficult for these foreign companies to come in, buy out and make our workers redundant.

the state of the country

The Extra Special PC has hit the nail right on the head with this one. Work hard, get nowt. Skive hard, get everything.

An ode to Steve Irwin

A bright & brash Australian,
the Hunter was his name.
All those slimy reptiles
brought him wealth and fame.

Some say he was a looker,
to girls he was a dish.
He knew everything about Crocodiles,
but fuck all about fish!

Back to Skool

OK, so most places have stopped mis-spelling 'school' now, after numerous complaints. However, one wonders who this promotion was aimed at, the teachers, or the kids (seeing as 1 in 4 apparently hit the bottle).

Thanks to Kurt for this one :o)

Yaaaaarrrggghhhh!

'tis Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Lost Weekend at Z-Rock Fest

Get yer arses down to Dudley on Sunday for the Z-Rock Fest and have a listen to Lost Weekend. Or else. Besides, you can get a copy of their new album 'Forever Moving On', which promises to be another good 'un.

best news website yet

OK, I thought that the Burning Times was fantastic, but I've found an even better one. Newsbiscuit! Woo hoo!

stolen bike alert

Red and black Ducati Monster Mob (very rare in the UK)
Reg number : HF 04 LKY
VIN number : ZDMH500AD4B007370
Stolen from Tyldesley, nr. Atherton, Greater Manchester at 2pm on Wednesday 13 September 2006

Any info, please contact wizardslair7@hotmail.com

Scuba-diving cat

Cashpoint cripples

The cashpoint at most supermarkets is usually less than 20 yards away from normal parking bays, and yet some people are so lazy and bone-idle that they can't be bothered to park up in a bay and walk for the extra five seconds to get to the machine. Instead, they park up on double-yellow lines, or in bays marked for use by disabled people and seem to be oblivious to the havoc they can cause.

Get off your fat arses and walk the extra few yards, and leave the disabled bays for people who really need them.

incontinence

Smurf's GT had a bit of an accident in the night and pissed petrol all over the garage floor; it would appear that the breather in the fuel cap was blocked. It stinks. Anyway, he's swept out as much as he can and put the offending machine in the garden to think about what it's done.

more BB woes

Oh what a fucking surprise! My broadband connection has been down again, all evening apparently. Not that I'd know if I hadn't been told, seeing as I've just worked 13 hours without a break.

I wonder what their excuse is this time? Oh, sorry, Orange don't give excuses, do they? Just platitudes and just lies, then tell you they're fixing it.

Now that it's back on, it's slower than dialup.

addendum

Orange's 'contact us' page is shite too, it's not compatible with Firefox. Magnifying glass, anyone?

The future's not so bright...

I am utterly fed up with my current broadband provider. Yes, Orange, that's you. Ever since Orange took over from Wanadoo, the service has been terrible. There have been several outages, lasting hours and even days at a time with no explanation or so much as a 'by your leave'. When you ring the service status line, they tell you everything is hunky dory, so you ring the helpline, get kept on hold for over half an hour and then speak to some pre-programmed robot who reads from a script which says:

"I'm sorry, we are aware that some customers are experiencing problems, but we are working hard to fix it."

If I hear that line one more time, I shall scream. I asked the last one "when will it be fixed" and was told "soon, probably". It was out for two days.

I'm fed up of them saying 'sorry' too. I don't give a flying fk how sorry they are, I want it fixed and I want it to stop collapsing on me every time I have a bloody deadline to meet.

I don't just use the Internet for leisure purposes, I need it for my work too, and it really is unacceptable. I'm paying £28 a month for a shite service, which is flaky at the best of times. I have a little network of friends now, all using Orange, and we text each other each time we can't connect, to make sure it is Orange's fault and not ours. One friend has been unable to gain access for two weeks and Orange refuse to talk to her because the account is in her boyfriend's name, even though he has given them authority to deal with her and she pays the damn bill.

Orange seriously needs to get its act together.

In the meantime, I am investigating other ISPs. So if anyone has any recommendations, please do let me know. I don't want e-mail addresses, I don't want a free modem (I've got three already, thanks), I don't want free webspace or flashy add-ons, anti-spam or anti-virus software.

All I want to do it connect to the Internet on a reliable service with no download limits. Is that too much to ask for?

Ban on skinny models

Well done, the organisers of Madrid's Fashion Week, for banning overly-skinny models from appearing on the catwalk.

It's about time that the fashion world realised that in the real world, most women don't look like anorexic stick-insects.

As for the comment that the ban is discriminating against the model and the freedom of the designer - get a life. If the model can't get a job as a clothes horse, she could get one as a xylophone instead, and if a designer can't design something for someone with a bit of meat, they should realise that they are crap and get a different job too.

red means STOP

Another Constable has declared war on cyclists who think that traffic lights don't apply to them. Exellent! Perhaps all the other coppers could do the same. I, for one, am very pissed off with cyclists who just barrel on through red lights and then glare at any driver who happens to be trying to cross their path.

Well done, AC, more power to your elbow!

oh poo!

We were having a lovely time at the Autumn M'NABD'ness rally at Cornbury Park. The sun was shining, the beer was flowing and the company was fantastic. We had to leave on Saturday afternoon to get home for Spike's mum's 60th birthday party, so we packed up, got on the bike and managed just over a mile before disaster struck. My throttle cable had snapped.

So there we were, at the side of the road, scratching our heads, when the lovely Bonehead happened to pass by, saw us and came back to ask if he could help. He then zoomed off to the site for backup. Ten minutes later, my knights in shining armour (well, in a white van anyway), Bob and Chris arrived, loaded the bike into the back of the van and took us back to the site.

It was clear that the cable wasn't broken at the handlebar end, so we took off the tank to get a better look at the other end, but that was intact too. It was then that Smurf came along, had a poke here and a pull there, and pulled out about a foot of cable from the sleeve. It hadn't just snapped, it was completely knackered. It was rusted and falling apart in several places. Not bad for only 2 years old :o( Anyway, Eddie and Smurf had a good look and decided that the only way to get a new cable on would be to drop the carbs. Not a job I really wanted to carry out with few tools and in the middle of a field so, for the first time in my life, I rang for the nice man in the big truck with the flashing lights. He really was a nice man too. Kevin the recovery bloke explained to me how he was going to put the bike on the back of the trailer whilst I watched anxiously as he winched my pride and joy up the ramp, and we were soon on our way. When we got back to Spike's we realised that there was no way that the truck would get up his street, so he dropped off the bike at the end of the road, and I fired it up on choke and used the choke as a throttle to get it up the back street to the garage, when it now sits, all lonely and forlorn.

I've tried ringing a few places today, but there are no Kawasaki dealers in Coventry, apparently, and not many other places are open on a Sunday. I may have to put an emergency cable kit on it to get me home and then go to a dealer nearer home. It may even come to using a bit of string yet. Oh what fun I have. I think it might be a good idea to replace the return cable at the same time, given the state that this one was in. It would save having to drop the carbs twice.

Big thanks to everyone who tried to help, though. Bonehead, you are, as always, a star :o)

knackered

OK, I know I've not blogged for ages. It's cos I'm too bloody busy and too knackered, so sorry but I'll get round to posting something constructive soon.