Get Balsamic Vinegar Quick, You Fool!

Ah, just a week ago the only virus we had to worry about was good old Conficker. Now even US-CERT is getting in on the swine flu hysteria. Or rather, they're telling us not to fall for swine flu spam. Tch. As if anyone would be that daft.

Talking of daft, if Richard Cook + partner, of Nuneaton, really do have swine flu then the person at the hospital that advised them to go and queue up in a Coventry chemist for their dose of Tamiflu should be shot. 

Pinging Zorro

No idea if this is a song title or not. A Mystery Prize(TM) to anyone who can enlighten me. In the meantime, back to the real point of this post:

Oi Zorro your comments are broken!

Or mebbe I'm barred? Argh, the paranoia.

No Lucifer

So the media is going crazyapeshit for swine flu now, while the more entrepreneurial set up companies like Total Culling Concept with the aim of winning those knee-jerk contracts that governments award in times of crisis to show that really honestly they're on top of the situation.

Seven possible cases in Wiltshire already.

Blimey. That's, like, next door. Not a moment to lose! I'd better contact those people at L.E. West for their "complete Flu Pandemic Solutions", and right away!

Or perhaps I'll just stay at home and barricade myself in the box room until the beans and pasta run out. If I opt for that then luckily there are plenty of mashups out there in Web 2.1(beta) so that I can live the pandemic vicariously in realtime, sneeze by cough by last dying gasp.

Talk about bad timing, though. The world's economy is going to fall to bits* if a third of the buying population dies off. Who's going to snap up those cut-price stockpiled cars and flatscreens? Perhaps the world's multinationals will see their opportunity for diversification and get into spade and coffin manufacture (furnaces are *so* last century, and not at all good for greenhouse emissions).

Gosh, we do live in exciting times.




* oh? it already has? so much for mashups, then

Things The Grandchildren Should Know

Ahh, Eels... what a band... probably one of those bands I'll never see, much as I'd love to. They don't seem to show up in the UK much, more's the pity.

Anyhow, let's kick off the week with a discussion of "Monday mornings as a critique of contemporary humanity", eh? Feel free to click off now if this doesn't float your boat.

It was certainly boat weather this morning though, wasn't it? It was getting hard to see where the towpath ended and the canal started as I trudged damply to work. Had to do a bit of a balancing act along the edge of the path for a bit, the puddles were so big on the path. Silly me, I needn't have bothered trying to keep my feet dry - the grass and cyclists-in-a-rush got me anyhow.

By the time I reached civilisation I was already drenched, which is probably why none of the car drivers bothered to slow down as they charged though the puddles at the side of the road.

 

Evidently they were all too busy on their mobiles (Hands free? How 2008! Everyone's realised that they won't get nicked for using a normal phone so why bother wiring yourself up?) or turning up the radio to drown out my imminent cries of "I HOPE YOU GET KEYED, YOU WANKER!" to slow down. 

Apo Pam Keka Ak Dag Maten

Hmmm. Apologies for the obscure (more than usual) title. That's the downside of using the iPod to generate titles. No idea what this one means (Mac, are you still reading? Help!). It's Pontish. Or Greek. Nice tune, anyhow.

I seem to be going through a bit of a verbal diarrhoea patch again. Nothing to say for the last month or so, and still nothing to say now, only this time I'm typing the nothing down instead of just thinking it. All for your benefit, dear reader.

Apropos of nothing, I was in France recently. If you're a stereotypical bigoted Englander at this point you'll probably be thinking:

• I fookin hate the Frogs, me
• This Bobbins bloke is a bit of a wanker, inne?
• That new advert for Wells Bombardier on the bus shelter by Sainsburys is brilliant

If so, you probably ought to click off (ooo, get him being all witty) right now. I like France. A nice uncomplicated country populated by generally nice uncomplicated people. They say what they mean, they don't muck about being pretend-polite to your face then call you a merde Anglais behind your back, if they don't like you it's pretty obvious, and if they don't care they just give it a good old Gallic Shrug and that's that. Good on them. 

They don't muck about in the shops either. I was in Puy St Vincent's equivalent of Coopers recently and was amazed by the prices on display. €3.74 for a block of cheese. €1.16 for some bog roll. €2.23 for a six pack of Krony (the nice stuff, not the piddle we brew in Reading or wherever). They don't bother with all this silly 95 or 98 or 99 cents nonsense. The prices actually have some bearing on the cost of the item, rather than the shopkeeper's greed. Cents actually seem to have meaning, at least in Puy St Vincent. Here, I basically ignore whatever comes after the decimal point and add another quid onto the bit to the left. The upshot of this is that, apart from the crisp machine at work, "pence" means nothing to me. I've got a huge pot of coppers in a drawer at home, all just sitting there uselessly. I reckon we ought to ditch the 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, and 20p coins. Price everything in pounds and 50ps. Stop pratting about pretending these other coins actually mean anything. 

I think there was originally a point to this post, but I can't remember what it was. It must be Wednesday. Never could get the hang of them.

Last Stop This Town

I see they’ve put that daft fence back at the Homebase end of the Victoria footbridge again. I wonder how long it will last this time? The last one survived a couple of weeks, I seem to recall.

Never could quite get my head around what the last one was for. Were too many pedestrians rushing along at breakneck speed, engrossed in their phones and creating Health & Safety issues for others? Were the skateboarders having too much fun, or the cyclists getting from A to B with too little hindrance? Or does somebody in the council know somebody who’s looking to offload a load of cast iron fencing? Presumably there is something to be gained by forcing everybody through a two-foot-wide bottleneck, but I’m buggered if I can see what it is.

While we’re in the vicinity, if you’re *really* bored (and you’d have to be to do this) why not stop a while at the traffic lights by the petrol station there and watch the number of people who drive into the box junction from Brougham Hayes and then stop at the red light on Lower Bristol Road as they turn right...




You couldn’t make this stuff up.

What Does PC Stand For, Daddy?

So, here I am on Easter Saturday (ed: is there such a day?) and I'm pretending to feel full after spending £50-odd at Pizza Express. Looks like there's a Pizza Crunch on as well as a recession - the pizzas are definitely smaller, yet the bills are bigger. Luckily Mrs Bobbins found a nifty website that has loads of discount vouchers, so we got a tenner off and knocked the price back to its pre-recession norm. Still don't feel stuffed though.

My task for the evening is to install Sacred Underworld on top of Sacred Plus. Not for me, mind - I gave up on PC games yonks ago when I realised that for every game you need to buy a new hard disk and a couple of new memory sticks. Nah, this is for my daughter. She's addicted to slicing up orcs and stuff. Training for a night out at the Blue Rooms, if this week's shenanigans on George Street are anything to go by.

This is installation attempt number four. The other three Just Didn't Work. Which is odd, considering Underworld is an "expansion pack"* designed to "seamlessly integrate" with the existing installation. Does it hell. All it does is puts up a tw@ish dialog box saying "please insert CD1" and then steadfastly refuse to do anything further once the required CD is inserted.

Grrr.

I hate computers, me.

So in answer to the title question, "PC" stands for "Pile of Crap". But you knew that anyway, didn't you?



* Sigh. I hate any form of software that has the word "pack" in the title. It's Softwarese for "stuff we should have put on the CD in the first place"