surly girl said…

never mind all that – i’m bored. can you post summat new? (please bear in mind that my laptop is crap and caches stuff so it’s entirely possible that you have posted and i just can’t see it)…..

What do you think this is, some sort of on-demand Sniffy Freak Show?

Bah!

Errrm, actually, I suppose you’re right.

Some bastard is going to beat me in my quest to acquire the Mystical Celtic Cross Stone. Destiny has decreed that the stone should be mine: I am its rightful custodian; great things have been foreseen for the two of us together. But these great and wonderous deeds will never be realised if some other twat gets hold of it. I need it, it has spoken to me. I cannot believe it may go to another.

Still, if I don’t win, I’ll use my powers to find out who did win it and I’ll hunt them down and torch their house!

That’ll learn em.

Freak like me
No public humiliation for me tonight. The world of bloggers has had enough treats/terrors over the past week or so. Sniffycam is now closed to all but those whom I truly love. I am using it to send scary video e-mails to my dear friends who moved hundreds of miles away to get away from me. Stalking is so easy in the electronic age.

A point of clarification
My hair is curly and curly it will stay. There are certain things about ourselves that we shouldn’t even think about trying to change.

I’d love to change the bags under my eyes though

And of course, after my outing by April I have to confess to doing regular rain dances in my bedroom, usually to Madonna’s Into the groove and usually only wearing my underwear.

Curly-haired blogger, Tina Cakesniffer, caused dismay and outrage today when she declared “I’m going straight!”. But she immediately allayed her fan’s (sic) fears by continuing: “After suffering with debilitating curly hair all my life, I’m getting the iron out. It’s going to be ‘goodbye curls’ from now on!”

True to her word, she then ironed her curly locks proudly showed off her straightness to the crowd that awaited her reappearance…

Nobody dared mention that she still looked a total twat.

Tina’ previous hair do(n’t) is the subject of some hot bidding activity in a 5 day Ebay auction.

Are ess ess?
I’ve been wondering how to sort out RSS feeds and stuff for ages, ten months in fact. The Sniffy Bogroll works on feeds and things, so the most recently updated blog will float to the top of the roll. Other than that, I’ve no idea how these things work. Lot of techno mumbo jumbo if you ask me.

Anyway, I’m delighted by Firefox’s and Opera’s RSS subscription function.

Magic.

Housework
Everytime I do battle with the vacuum cleaner (which I SWEAR I’m allergic to, I absol) I end up singing The B52’s Housework (Bouncing off the satellites, 1986) to myself. Wanna see why?

I am don’ my housework
Got no time to fool ’round
I am doin’ my housework
Cleanin’ up and I’m gettin’ down

It’ll be so clean
You can eat off the floor
You can eat off the wall
Or anywhere at all
‘Cause I’ll make this place
A party pad for two
And I’m not stoppin’ till I do

Housework, housework

I’m so tired of this vacuum
Need a man to help soon
Don’t need a man to make a move on me
I need a man to move in with me
Don’t need a man to treat me mean
I need a man to help me clean

Someone who’s heaven sent
Someone to help pay rent
Someone to share dreams and wishes
Someone to help me do the dishes

Of all the songs out there, this one just about sums up what relationships and living together are all about. Someone to share dreams and wishes, someone to help me do the dishes. That’ll do for me.

Who’ll protect you from the hooded sniffer?
Having confessed to being a lover of hooded tops, I thought it only fair to show the world my collection of FIVE hooded tops.

• Top is today’s choice: The Adidas (a-deee-dass) bargain (£5 from JJB Sports).
• Row two is my fleecey one for playing out in when it gets cold.
• Row three is my Marks and Spencer “Limited Collection with cashmere” one – see how I can’t help but feel the quality and luxury of the 7% cashmere.
• Bottom left: cheap and nasty from Matalan (god I’ve put weight on since then!)
• Bottom right: another excuse to show off my favourite T-shirtand favourite hoody – £11 from Costco, currently languishing in the laundry bag because it smells of cooking.

I do wish the Italians would give a bit of thought before phoning my dad. You see, if they phone too early in the morning, Dad will still be in bed, his throat will be croaky and he won’t have put his teeth in.

This morning’s crisis seemingly relates to my dad’s bitch sister who embezzled ALL of my grandfather’s money for her own family. All I could hear my dad saying was “Rosie (my cousin, daughter of nice auntie), she is dead to me, I don’t care, get Gianni (bitch auntie’s eldest heroin addict son) to sort it.”

It’s like something out of The Godfather, only slightly more gummy.

Dad’s first name is Donato, so he is known in local restaurant as Mr Donato or Don Cakesniffer. If only we had the backing of the Mafia, my life would be so much easier.

“Daddy, I’ve seen this job that I want, can I have it please?”

“Si, si, certo la mia bella figlia”

“Thanks, Daddy. Oh, and Daddy…”

“…Huh?”

“…Daddy, there’s a list of people I’d like to be killed on my desk. Cheerio!”

Pop goes the Cakesniffer
So, this is the last word on popups because the whole thing has been making me demented and I need to direct my sapping energy to other things (such as compiling lists of people that I want Daddy’s people to kill).

I’m not sure what started the popups coming, but I’ve stripped back the blog a fair bit in an attempt to stop them. I too have been experiencing them (Dell computers this week) and it’s been a real pain in the shitter. [So crude for a Sunday]. Anyway, I’m not sure whether it’ll help, but I recommend that people follow Indiaiynke’s advice (see below); we should all be doing this routinely anyway.

• Make sure your firewall(s) and antivirus software are up to date
• Turn the popup blocker on (IE 6 on Win XP, Firefox, Opera and Google toolbar all have integrated popup blockers too)
• Clear the cache regularly
• Run a regular spyware scan – I use Zone Alarms and there are others such as Adaware and even Windows has one I think

Hope for the best.

I ran the Zone alarms scan on Friday and haven’t had a popup since, but that doesn’t mean to say that it won’t happen again.

In the meantime, if people are worried about getting popups at work, I’m currently copying all posts over to Sniffyblog, if you simply can’t stay away. Sad and desperate fools.

This is an edit of the:

“A test

Shitting buggery.”

Post from the wee hours of the morning, if anybody is wondering where the unrelated comments came from.

Ok, so it seems that after spending an entire fucking afternoon, pissing about creating a an EXCELLENT alternative site for Cakesniffers, you ungrateful bastards want to stay here afterall.

So here we’ll stay.

At least the other place is set up and ready to go should things go really tits up here.

Right then…

Cakesniffy readers: they laugh at others’ misfortunes
Nice to know how much readers of this blog care about my wellbeing and the suffering that I endure at the hands of my parents. A quote from Coldearth “Lame my arse..had me in stiches!” Yeah, I laugh loads when I’m covered in third degree burns.

Bastards.

Cakesniffy affirmatives and negatives

1. Sniffycam porn action: Well, like or not, that’s all you’re getting. What sort of friggin’ idiot do you think I am? Don’t you think I make a big enough tit of myself here?
2. “Working from home”: No. Can’t stand it. I’m not disciplined enough for this.
3. Music download sites: Load of bollocks. You’re not allowed to use any of the ones where you might find what you’re looking for and the paid ones only have current stuff. Pile of crap. Unfortunately, I’m running well short of space for CDs too, so I’m getting a bit stuck.
4. Leftover Hallowe’en chocolate: Love it – just found there was a bag with loads of miniature Flakes, Mars bars, Twix, Twirls and the like in the fridge. Nice one! (Yes Herge, Hallowe””en. Git)
5. Ketamine for kitties: No thank you! I’m confiscating Otto’s stash and he’s under curfew from 9pm from now on.
6. Lambs to the slaughter before the 9pm TV watershed: Absolutely not! This is in reference to Jamie Oliver being told off for his latest UK TV show in which he’s touring Italy. In the latest episode, he was shown killing a lamb by slitting its throat without it being anaesthetised first. The programme is screened before 9pm and a few people were upset by this, as I’d have been had I seen it. So it’s a big fat no for this one. Fucking bastard.
7. Two-fingered salutes: Bronwen was wondering why British people use a two-fingered as opposed to a one-fingered salute. It’s basically to piss off the Frenchies (battle of Agincourt and that) and I say Hallelujah to that!
8. Shutting down Cakesniffers on Blogger and switching to WordPress – No, although I’m thinking of things that I can do there.
9. Diverting spam comment e-mails to April: Oh yes! Anything that gets April to degrade herself has got to get the thumbs up
10. Hooded tops: Aye, love ’em (I now have FIVE in various styles). However, those fucking cock teenagers who wear the hoods up over a baseball cap, under a coat hood look utter twats.
11. Firefox????: Hrrrm, it’s OK. I liked the tabbed windows. Although I do like the in-line autocomplete when you’re entering addresses in IE (Firefox doesn’t do this). Apparently though, a little piggy tells me that Opera is the way forward for internet browsing.

Out of your musical mysery
The song was indeed Torn by the delicious Natalie Imbruglia (and also some Norwegians who did it originally, but not nearly as well).

Phwoaarr

Fancy singing along?

I thought I saw a man brought to life
He was warm
He came around like he was dignified
He showed me what it was to cry
Well you couldn’t be that man I adored
You don’t seem to know
Seem to care what your heart is for
But I don’t know him anymore
There’s nothing where he used to lie
The conversation has run dry
That’s what’s going on
Nothing’s fine I’m torn

I’m all out of faith
This is how I feel
I’m cold and I am shamed
Lying naked on the floor
Illusion never changed
Into something real
I’m wide awake
And I can see
The perfect sky is torn
You’re a little late
I’m already torn

So I guess the fortune teller’s right
i Should have seen just what was there
And not some holy light
it crawled beneath my veins
And now I don’t care
I had no luck
I don’t miss it all that much
There’s just so many things
That I can touch I’m torn

I’m all out of faith
This is how I feel
I’m cold and I am shamed
Lying naked on the floor
Illusion never changed
Into something real
I’m wide awake
And I can see
The perfect sky is torn
You’re a little late
I’m already torn
Torn

hoooooooooo hohooooooo hohoooo

There’s nothing where he used to lie
My inspiration has run dry
That’s what’s going on
Nothing’s right I’m torn

I’m all out of faith
This is how I feel
I’m cold and I am shamed
Lying naked on the floor
Illusion never changed
Into something real
I’m wide awake
And I can see
The perfect sky is torn

I’m all out of faith
This is how I feel
I’m cold and I’m ashamed
Bound and broken on the floor
You’re a little late
I’m already torn
Torn.

Oh

British folk of my age will probably remember a 1970s/1980s TV programme called On the move. I can’t really remember what it was about, apart from it was about deaf people and there were people waving their arms about, but it was one of the few opportunities for tellyviewing that were available on dreary Sunday mornings.

Anyway, there’s a chance that Cakesniffers might be on the move to a new home. Concerned that people are experiencing popups, and fed up with the amount of spam, I reckon that the cakesniffers url has been cursed and that all sorts of shit is being directed here. I’ve tried stripping down the blog as much as possible, but the problem is still there. I’ve been considering a few options and this seems the most likely way forward.

As you can see, I’ve copied over the past couple of months’ worth of cakesniffing posts and I’ve included the entire Cakesniffers archive. This means that all links that people may have in their own blogs should still be active. I’d be very grateful to know what people think.

Bloody hell, it’s only a blog, for fuck’s sake.

There are loads of different types of shower:

• Power shower
• Electric
• Thermostatic mixer
• Hydroptherapry
• Fixed head
• Detachable head

and not forgetting…

• Some crap thing that you fit to your bath taps

(Somebody being facetious might also throw in “April showers” and “Sunny spells with the odd shower”. But I’m not like that.)

You can have separate showers in their own cubicles (they call them “enclosures” these days apparently) and even shower rooms, where everything gets wet, but you just don’t care because you’re all oo la la and continental.

Anyway, the Cakesniffer household has a simple shower that looks a bit of a Heath Robinson contraption; it’s simply something that fits over the exisitng bath taps with a hose running from it. One day, we might progress to changing the bath taps to those that incorporate a similar device, has the same function and mechanism of working, but doesn’t look quite as shit. If only I could be bothered.

So the shower runs off the hot water in the storage tank, mixed in with the required amount of cold water from the mains supply. Now, for some reason the hot water is superheated (I suppose we could turn the temperature down if we could be bothered) and a comfortable water temperture for the purpose of having a shower is very much at the mercy of having a specific and constant proportion of cold water mixed in with it. And this brings me to my main question for today. The question being:

What part of “DO NOT TOUCH THE WATER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!” do my parents not understand?

On a number of occasions, the sniffy bonce, bum and bosom has suffered scalds because Mother (aww, bless her) or Father (“Dad, are you paying attention??”) have:

• “Just filled the kettle”
• “Just rinsed their hands”
• “Just briefly washed the car”
• “Just forgot”
• “Just did it to hear how loud you could scream”

Demented buggers.

Wake up, pay attention!
But Mother’s (awww, bless her) lack of attention can sometimes bring great amusement. Have a look at this:

This is the electric switch unit for the central heating boiler. It’s usually covered by the control unit, but this had to be taken off briefly when we were decorating last year.

Having removed the control unit, thus exposing the lectrics, I told her “I can’t be arsed knocking the circuit off, so they’re still live. Don’t touch any of it, it’s ELECTRIC.”

As we were hanging the paper (which was obviously wet with wallpaper paste), she let out a sort of whimpering scream, jumped across the room, and steadied herself against the wall with her hand over her mouth.

“Mother! What did you do?”

“The wall…” she gasped, shaking, “… it bit me!”

“Yeah right, you stupid woman. You put your finger in that socket, didn’t you? You’ve only electrocuted yourself, you’ll live. You OK?”

“But I didn’t know it was there!”

“And so what part of ‘Don’t touch that, it’s lectric’ don’t you understand? Is it the same part of ‘I’m getting in the shower, don’t touch the water’ that you fail to take in?”

Im surprised she’s made it to the tender age of 72, clumsy bugger. But, awww, bless her. I do love her to bits.

Fuck, this is a lame one. Back with more fun later.

With gale-force winds and torrential rain lashing the UK almost consistently for the past three weeks, it makes you wonder what the end of the world might be like. Not much different to this I’ll bet, only about 50°C hotter with less oxygen and more sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere. In fact, here in Salford, all we need is for the temperature to hot up and we’ll be there.

Aces!

I bet the end of the world would be quite depressing, knowing that there wasn’t really any going back, that your goose was well and truly cooked and that. Is it “and that” or “and stuff” in that situation? Bloody syntax.

Anyway, not point worrying about the end of the world on a Friday afternoon. Better to leave those sorts of things till Sunday teatime when you’re faced with the dread of going back to school on Monday. This is particularly difficult if you’re not long back from your holiday oversees and you still haven’t quite recovered from your jetlag. Eh Whinger?

So it’s Friday afternoon and, after a very long but enjoyable meeting at a local hospital this morning, I’m officially “working from home”. This inevitably means that I’m fucking about on the internet, but so long as I, at some point over the weekend, produce an informative and user-friendly leaflet, and prepare my teaching session for next week, then everything will be fine.

I tell you what, I love my PC and I love Windows XP (professional, you know). It just makes everything work properly. I know it has its problems and some people hate it (generally stupid people), and no doubt there’ll be things that I get pissed off with too, but it just clicks with everything so well.

OK then, as promised a while ago, it’s time for a…

1. Sniffycam porn action
2. “Working from home”
3. Music download sites
4. Leftover Hallowe’en chocolate
5. Ketamine for kitties
6. Lambs to the slaughter before the 9pm TV watershed
7. Two-fingered salutes
8. Shutting down Cakesniffers on Blogger and switching to WordPress
9. Diverting spam comment e-mails to April
10. Hooded tops
11. Firefox???? (Yeah, I added this one later)

There you go, and not forgetting:

Musical mystery
“I thought I saw a man brought to life “

Next line, or song title and artist please.

Well, I knew it wouldn’t take long before people started coming after me for Sniffycam action, so for a special treat, for this one time only, here it is…

You know, if people who knew me ever saw any of this, they’d swear I was completely mental. I have no idea what is going on with the bra, it looks quite normal in real life. And no, I can’t do any facial expressions other than: confused; smiley; gormless; grumpy; belligerent.

Oh boy, and are we in for lots of doom and gloom to come?

Looking at the headlines, there are two things we need to worry about, and perhaps something to look forward to.

Brrrrr…
Firstly, people are extremely worried because, with December approaching, there is some compelling evidence to say that it might get cold! I don’t know how we’re going to survive if that happens. The problem is that it’s not only going to get cold, but we might even have snow too. The country will grind to a halt. We might have to don hi-vis coats and sweep our paths!

Now, I’m not sure about everyone else in Britain, but for as long as I can remember, as soon as the clocks go back each year, we’ve been threatened with “The worst winter on record EVER!” and it’s never materialised. And so what if it does? When was the last time anybody except the Ock Nock Nooks and the Cumbrians had the opportunity to play out in the snow instead of getting stuck in it coming home from work for the one day that it falls?

Cocks.

Lock ’em up!
Apparently, most people in Britain want terror suspects to be detained without formal charge for as long as is necessary to gather evidence against them – according to some reports at least. I think that should be “Of 432 people who rang our phone line, 321 agreed with the proposals to detain terror suspects for 90 days without charge”. Of course, this is a phone poll in a hang ’em high, right-wing tabloid.

“I am arresting you because you look a bit shifty and you’re driving a souped-up Honda with the music on too loud- and that’s more than I have to tell you under the Terrorism Act”

Bollocks to that.

No offence intended
People are up in arms because certain “Theys” are banning Christmas because they don’t want to cause offence to other faiths (“Winter lights” instead of “Christmas lights”, not being able to wish people “Merry Christmas”, etc, etc). When are the politically correct numpties who are in charge of making such decisions going to learn that you don’t have an open and welcoming society by banning things because YOU think they might cause offence?

• Firstly, you ask people what offends them and ask them to justify this. In many cases, people of non-Christian faiths have no problem and the problem lies solely in the warped mind of a white, middle-class, lefty graduate who’s been on too many equality and diversity courses wthout ever actually speaking to to somebody from a minority group.
• You then tell them that there are certain things that they do that might cause offence to certain sections of society, but we’re all grown ups and we have to accept that people have different values and so long as no harm or offence is intended on anybody’s part, then we should all get along fine.
• If people find our traditions offensive for no good reason, then is they who have the problem and it’s this that needs to be addressed, rather than banning things.
• We all live happily ever after.

And that is what I think.

Oh, I forgot the good thing – Tony Blair’s defeat in parliament over the Terrorism Act.

..burning like fire
Getting up is very difficult when it’s dark; it seems to compound the chronic fatigue that is borne out of months of sleep deprivation. The state of malaise is aggravated by having pissholes for eyes – they just do not want to open. Bloodshot ‘n’ baggy is definitely “in” this autumn. Still, the last thing you need is for your eyes to look even piggier by wearing your specs, so you persevere with contact lenses.

So this exhausted commuter finally makes it out of their house and into their car. The rising and setting winter sun can be quite a hazard for motorists; this morning’s trek to Runcorn was quite painful for me in that, in addition to having the low sun in my face for the entire journey, both of my eyes were being irritated by the contact lenses I was wearing. On reaching work, I decided to give the contacts a quick bath. I took out the left one, was shocked and appalled, and was forced to remove the right one, upon which I’d have been incandescent with rage had I had any energy.

Look at these buggers:

And on closer inspection:

Bastard things.

I blame that woman at Costco: “Are you sure this is your prescription?”

“Yes, I’m sure, order them please.”

“Absolutely sure you want these lenses?”

“Yes, yes, please order them”

“OK then, on your own head be it”

Now I know why I heard an evil cackle as she turned her back to me.

Not all bad news
It certainly wasn’t: today was an excellent day when it came to bowel movements; Boots had my styling product in (and it was on three for two); we had those nice big mushrooms with tea; I got my webcam working; I said “Off you pop” to the popups; and I played the best jolly jape on dear April.

Disturbing
Some blogspot sites have been blocked by the work’s firewall. And no, that’s not a jumped-up excuse for selective commenting or favouritism. Well, it is. But it’s quite scary – who’s blog will be blocked next? Will this mean that I have to spend the WHOLE day actually working? God, I’ll die!

Aerial
Got the new Kate Bush album, Aerial, today. Some of it is really good (mainly the second of the CDs) and some of it is weird to the point of being plain old daft. For example, in “pi” she actually sings out the number. There’s also another one about a washing machine. However, mixed in with the expected oddness is some really beautiful stuff.

If you like Kate, give this a go because there’ll be something on there that you really enjoy. If you can’t stand her, don’t bother.

A shorta fairytale
Once upon a time, a girl asked a guy:

“Will you marry me?”

The guy said, “NO!”

And the girl lived happily ever after…
…and went shopping, dancing, camping, drank martinis, always had a clean house, never had to cook and farted whenever she wanted.

THE END

Right, I’m off to see if April is repentant and I might consider taking off that e-mail divert.