Surfing Tommies

This evening, H and I went to see Surfing Tommies at Bury Met. I wasn't really sure what to expect, and from the description on the website, it didn't seem to be 'my thing', but I'm glad to say I was completely and utterly wrong.

I'm not going to tell you the story, because there's a summary on their website, but it made me laugh, it made me cry and it made me think. I was mightily impressed by the versatility of the actors, and by the clever use of the set. The whole production was superb.

I can highly recommend it, so if you live anywhere near where they're touring next, do go and see it. You won't be disappointed.

Please put the item in the bag!

Supermarket bosses have come up with this brilliant new idea to annoy their customers. Firstly, they introduce self-service tills, so that customers can scan and pack their own items without the inconvenience of having to interact with another human being. Then they reduce the number of open checkouts, so that the queues at the ones staffed by real people are horrendously long. The supermarket I visited this morning had only one proper checkout open. This 'encourages' the customers with few items to go to the self-service tills where it often takes them far longer to process their shopping than it would if they had waited in the queue at the other one.

How so? Well firstly, the machine yells at you in a very loud voice to "Please scan an item". So, you scan the item and before you even have chance to draw breath, it yells "Please put your item in the bag!", so you put it in the bag. However, the machine doesn't recognise the fact that you've done this and yells again "Please put your item in the bag! Please put your item in the bag! Please put your item in the bag!" until you take out the item and then put it back in again. Then it yells "Unexpected item in the bagging area, please remove the item." So you remove it and it yells at you again: "Please put your item in the bag!" So you do, and it yells "Please scan an item!"

You attempt to scan the next thing, but it doesn't recognise the bar code, so you faff around for ages to get it to scan and put it in the bag. Again, it yells "Please put your item in the bag!" - but you already have done, so it just carries on yelling at you until the assistant comes to tell the machine to shut up. By this time, you have completely lost your temper and have resorted to shouting obscenities at the machine which, being a machine, neither hears nor cares.

This morning, after such an experience, I asked the assistant if these self-service tills were just a way of avoiding having to employ more staff on the checkouts, and she told me that the staff at that supermarket hate them, and they wish that people would boycott them because they are more trouble than they are worth. They consider it a punishment if they are assigned to monitor the self-service tills because they are such a pain. I told her that if they could at least reduce the volume on the damn things, it would help, and she said that they used to be able to but the new software 'upgrade' removed that option. Great.

Arrests at Stonehenge summer solstice celebration

"About 20 people were arrested for minor drug offences during summer solstice celebrations at Stonehenge.

English Heritage said more than 18,000 revellers gathered at the prehistoric site in Wiltshire to witness the sunrise on the longest day of the year."

So that's about 0.001% of the people attending who were arrested. That's not a news story, that's just a headline to give a beautiful ceremony a bad name. Why can't people write nice headlines about these wonderful events?

Getting Spicy

Almost all recipes requiring the addition of dried spices give the measurements in teaspoons.

Why, then, do the manufacturers of those little jars of spices, not make the necks of those jars big enough to get a teaspoon in?

What a Lightmare!

Regular readers of my blog will be only too aware of my hatred of high-intensity headlamps and brake lights. So, I'm very pleased that someone has launched a campaign to highlight (pun intended) the problems that these retina-scorchers cause.

Go on over to Lightmare and sign the petition!

Is Audi the new Volvo?

For many years, Volvos were the cars to watch out for, particularly if you ride a motorbike. With their side-impact bars, airbags, ABS and other so-called safety devices, the drivers were shielded from reality, secure in the knowledge that if they had a crash, they would be safely cocooned in their padded cage.

I used to wonder if it was the case that bad drivers bought Volvos, or that previously reasonably-good drivers were lulled into crapness by all these devices designed to take the responsibility away from the driver.

However, given the standard of driving I've witnessed recently, I am now convinced that the Audi is the new car of choice for the crap driver. Almost every 'bad driving' incident I have seen in the past few months has involved a black Audi. Tailgating, speeding, running red lights, drivers using mobile phones, drivers not wearing seatbelts, driving up pavements because they can't be bothered to wait for the vehicle in front to turn right, taking up two parking bays in busy car parks because they are unable to park straight or overtaking motorbikes and pedal bikes and then turning across their path. The list is not exhaustive.

This morning's incident made me shudder. A bloke on a bicycle was approaching a pinch-point in the road. As he moved out to go through it, the driver of the black Audi in front of me decided he wasn't going to slow down to wait for the cyclist to go through, so he drove round the cyclist and pushed in front of him - with only about 6" longer than the car to spare. This forced the cyclist off the road and he had to stop, in order to avoid getting knocked off. The Audi driver sped off down the road without, I suspect, a backwards glance. The cyclist was clearly shaken.

Now this rant was supposed to be just about crap driving, but I've been told I also have to mention the over-dark tinted windows so you can't actually see the driver (and presumably so the driver can't see cyclists), the blinding LEDs which show you where the headlamps are, and the apparent failure of Audi to provide an off-switch for the foglamps or a functioning indicator switch. There is also my constant frustration at the inability of drivers to use a handbrake, preferring instead to keep their foot on the brake and blinding those behind them with their extra-high-intensity eye-level brake lights. Yes, I know some cars have electronic parking brakes. I hate those too, and so does everyone I know who has a car with one fitted.

I think it's about time we got rid of all of these devices and made drivers actually think and drive for themselves, and put the responsibility firmly back on to the driver, not the machine.

More linguistic grumbles

The bloke on the news said that Tommy Docherty has a very unique situation. 'Very unique'? Either it's unique or it's not!

On an amusing note, Eilish is collecting examples of the misuse of the word 'literally'. Here's a couple she's found so far:

Radio Scotland, 18 March: "My head literally began to spin at the thought of it".

Apparently George Osborne is "Literally cutting corners"

"Literally handbags at dawn"

"Stallone is literally about to explode"

Anyone got any more?

Daily chuckle

Every morning on my way into work, I see a man and his daughter walking to school with their cocker spaniel. Every time I see the spaniel, she has something in her mouth, and either man or daughter is trying to remove it. Yesterday it was a paper plate, this morning she was dragging a bin bag. Other days she has foraged plastic bottles, cans, crisp packets, broken umbrellas, popped footballs, a shoe and a pizza box.

I love that dog, she makes me laugh every time I see her. I don't know what's funniest, the happy look on her face as she finds something else to carry, or the exasperated look on the owners' faces as they try to extricate the latest 'find'. As soon as they've taken one thing away, the dog just picks up something else and looks ever so pleased with herself.

Personally, I think they should carry a plastic bag and let the dog pick up litter on the way home and, that way the route will gradually get tidier.

A forest of signs

As if our towns aren't cluttered up with enough crap, Bolton Council has now decided to look at renting out advertising space on lampposts. Great. Even more rubbish to distract and confuse motorists and make the place look like a complete and utter tip.

Two rants in one

First up, toothpaste tubes. They used to be made from metal, and you could fold the ends of them over as you used up the toothpaste, so that the remaining paste was kept at the nozzle end of the tube. These days, they're made from plastic, so once you've used more than half of the toothpaste, you have to constantly push the remainder up towards the end. However, it never stays there, it redistributes itself and you end up trying to mash the tube in order to get the blasted paste out. I hate these new tubes. I want the metal ones back, please!

Second up, the revolving doors at Morrison's Supermarket. Have they deliberately set these doors to revolving so slowly that you have the urge to smash them down, or is that just me? You always end up getting some impatient person (me) tutting and whining about them because they're impeding my progress to the Crabbies aisle, whilst someone else, who isn't paying attention, sets off the sensor at the back of the doors, stopping them altogether. Sometimes you get 25 people all trying to cram into the space at the same time, and at others you get a tailback because people don't want to stand in the space with anyone else. Why do they need revolving doors anyway? What's wrong with sliding doors like everywhere else?

Today is 'Drive Like a Dick' Day

This morning saw some of the worst driving I've seen in quite some time on my daily commute. Three cars completely ignored the red traffic light at the end of my road, as did a cyclist; two cars ignored the fact that it was my right of way at one of the chicanes and didn't even dare to look at me as they drove past, their stares fixed firmly ahead, hands gripping the steering wheel tightly. The 30mph maximum speed limit appears to have been re-assigned as a minimum speed limit and I have given up counting the number of people I see driving whilst using a mobile phone.

However, the best has got to be the teenage dickhead in the knackered white Fiesta who zoomed up behind me and then gesticulated angrily as I slowed down to 20mph (as per the speed limit sign) by the kiddies' play area in Chew Moor. Not happy with this delay to his journey, he then proceeded to overtake me in what sounded like first gear, despite the fact that I was overtaking parked cars on this already narrow road. He drove up onto the pavement and then bumped back down again, swerving to the left in order to avoid the oncoming bus and nearly hitting a parked car in the process. He then got held up by the three cars in front of me, who were also observing the 20mph limit. When we came to the blind left-hand bend, he decided to overtake those three cars too, and narrowly missed another oncoming vehicle. Not deterred, he then put his foot down and almost got the car on two wheels through the chicane. He decided not to go through the width restriction at Lostock Station and chose to take the other route. Imagine how pissed off he must have been when he got to the Beaumont Road traffic lights, then, to find himself behind me once again. I must admit, I did snigger just a little.

Pronunciation Rant

Right you lot, I'm fed up with you misusing and mispronouncing words and some of them really really annoy me. Let's start with this one: 'masseuse'. The word comes from the French 'masser' - to massage.

Firstly, please stop referring to a 'male masseuse'. A 'masseuse' has to be, by definition, a woman. The male version of the word is 'masseur'. Got that?

Now, can you pronounce the word 'masseur'? It's a bit like 'mass' and 'err', put together. Try it. I bet you knew that already.

OK, so let's try the other one, 'masseuse'. No, it's not 'mass - oose', that's an American term for 'I can't speak French so I'll make something up'), it's pronounced 'mass -errs', or in the IPA: ma-sœz.If you insist on using French words in your speech, at least make the effort to learn the correct pronunciation so you don't sound like a tit.

Psychic news reporting

The Manchester Evening News has reported on an event which hasn't actually started yet. Perhaps it should report on its secret time-travelling device instead?

Crap TV

I keep seeing polls on various websites asking whom I think should win 'I'm a Celebrity' or Crap Factor.

There's always one option missing: 'I couldn't give a rat's arse because I wouldn't defile my television with that pile of crapola.'

Crap Factor is just karaoke, and "I'm a Celebrity' should be renamed 'I'm a Nobody Whose Career is Flagging so I'll Do Anything to Get on TV'.

WEEE!

Why do retailers of 'white goods' always announce "and we'll even take away your old one for free!" as though it's some sort of special deal?

They're legally required to do this under the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive.

Cleaning up other people's mess

On Saturday morning, I joined the Friends of Eatock Lodge in a litter-pick. The main things we retrieved were drinks cans, bread wrappers and bags full of dog crap.

So, if you're one of those who drinks in the park, why can't you chuck your cans in one of the five litterbins? There's one at each entrance to the lodge, so you can do it on your way home.

If you care enough to go to feed the ducks, why do you then leave the plastic wrapper behind? Ducks don't like eating plastic. Same as above - stick it in the bin!

As for those who leave bags of dog crap behind, you are just scum. Stick it in the bloody bin! Think about it, you brainless idiots! By bagging it and then chucking the bag in the bushes, you have turned something that would have washed away in a few days, into something which will take months to even begin biodegrading. It'd be better if you just chucked the crap into the bushes without bagging it, if you're too bone idle to put it in the bins which you have to walk past on your way out of the park anyway.

Oh just let me ride my bike!

OK, spur of the moment, I decided to go out on the bike, so I went to move the van, but it wouldn't start. After some messing I managed to shift it.

Then the boss rang, wanting train tickets booked. So I sorted that out and eventually got out on the bike and went for petrol, but the queues were horrendous, and the idiot in front of me decided to do her makeup before setting off. The pay at pump facility wasn't working and queue inside the kiosk was awful, and it eventually took me 15 mins to pay up and go.

Then I joined the queue for the air supply. The other people took ages and when it was eventually my turn, I discovered why - the compressor wasn't working properly and was on a go slow.

So, an hour after I set off, I have done a grand total of 7 miles and stopped for a drink. Buggerit.
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Saturday live

One thing that drives me nuts every Saturday morning, is the opening to the Radio 4 programme 'Saturday Live'.

Apart from the pointless music intro, it's an audio montage of 2-second clips from items in the programme which is probably aimed at enthusing you about the contents. Well sorry, but all it makes me want to do is throw the radio through the window. It's the audio equivalent of puréeing a salad to make it look more tasty.

Oh how I miss John Peel and his 'Home Truths'.
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Where does the time go?

Oh my blog, how I have neglected you. So many things to do and so little time in which to do them.

I've promised to do a car boot sale on Sunday, and have approximately 1 hour free over the next couple of days in which to sort out the stuff to take. I did try to set aside a couple of boxes a while ago, but never quite got around to filling them, so my house is still full of junk.

A warning to those who have iPhones

At the weekend, my friend's iPhone was stolen from her tent whilst she slept. It would appear that hers was not the only one to go missing that night, we know of at least three others, and the thieves only took iPhones.

The Police told her that there is an application (app) which uses bluetooth to pinpoint the location of other iPhones, and that thieves are using it in order to steal them. In her case, the thieves have now bagged themselves a very expensive brick, because she had the phone blocked as soon as she discovered it was missing.

So, if you have an iPhone, turn off the bluetooth whenever you're not using it.