There’s a problem in my house, sorry, the house where I live with my parents and the cats. The problem is that there is TOO MUCH SHIT in here!

Every available space is filled with something, nothing is ever allowed to be thrown away, things that are brought here as a joke are kept and crammed on a shelf or in a case with everything else – as are things my dad finds on his wanders around the streets. Having filled every available cubic millimetre of space in cupboards, drawers and on shelves, things are hung from the backs of doors, the outside of wardrobes.

It’s a bit like living in Stig of the Dump’s house.

This presents a problem: none of the doors open fully because there’s always something behind them that blocks their swing. Unfortunately, the things hanging from the back of the doors tend to be springy, so you often find a door that you’ve opened bounce straight back at you and clatter you on the elbow.

I’m covered in bruises. If was a child, I’d have been taken into care by now. Unfortunatley, have I’d probably ended up with my shithead neighbours. You’d have thought that I’d perhaps have learnt to be a bit more careful by now.

FINE! So this is how it’s going to be until November, is it? Now that the weather has finally got above freezing, and even gets above 10°C most days, I have my bedroom window open for a bit of fresh air – besides, the thermostat’s bust and we can’t turn the central heating off, so it’s baking hot.

Anyway, not having enough space to buzz around in in the Earth’s vast biosphere, the bloody bees and wasps always insist on finding the smallest opening in my window and getting themselves trapped in my bedroom. This stupid fucker was there when I got home from work this afternoon:

Anyway, after watching him for half an hour and taking lots of photos, I decided to open the big window to let him out since finding the now widened opening of the smaller window was proving too much for it. Stupid fucker. So, I opened the big window that he’d been continually bashing his brains out against for about 40 minutes and he STILL couldn’t figure out how to escape.

I had to shoo him away with a Mma Ramotswe (Kalahari typing school for men), and off he buzzed, lolling about on the breeze.

He was really big though, a good 2cm in length!

No doubt more of the stupid things will be back by the end of summer. I just don’t get it; all that free air and they have to find an open window.

Stupid, just stupid.

If you want to read more about wasps, I suggest you check out Angry Chimp’s take on them.

Well, the old folk of sleepy Lancashire seaside town, Lytham St Anne’s, must’ve thought their world had come to an end yesterday. “Why?”, I hear the public cry. Well, there’s a nice little boating lake that’s home to a host of waterfowl at Lytham and me and my friends took with us a loaf of bread each to feed the geese and duck and swan. We were merrily feeding away, being attacked and nipped by the hungry birds, and I wondered why a nearby pair of old ladies was looking at me with such disgust when I was being so friendly to the animals:

Well, readers of Andy’s blog, Walls come tumbling, will have seen that an uproar has been caused by a shopping centre wanting to ban gangs of youths who trudge around, wearing baseball caps with hooded tops and generally looking/acting thuggish and threatening. So these poor old dears must’ve been watching me feeding these birds, but, because of my “gangsta” attire, they were too scared to point out the sign that requested people not to feed the birds.

For goodness sake, the way they were looking at me, you’d have thought I was going through the flock and systematically breaking each of their stupid necks and then using them for sexual fulfilment! I was only trying to be friendly, the poor little bastards must’ve been starving if nobody was feeding them.

More “My day out 2” photos are available on My Webshots gallery.

Members of my family and my next door neighbours (as if I give a shit) might have been alarmed to hear buzzing from behind my bedroom door last night. Now, I’ll hold my hands up and will, in the words of those Bananarama girls, plead “Guilty to love in the first degree*” if accused of gaining pleasure from the use of battery-powered bedroom companions – if only on a very rare occasion. However, last night I was innocent of all charges, Your Honour!

I’d gone up to bed to find that I had this little feller on my pillow for company…

This was where he finally noticed the close-up flash photography and decided to go for me.

He spent the night in my room and was still buzzing around this morning. He? Well, it took so many attempts for him to find the open window that it just had to be a “he”. I had to chuck him out eventually.

Of course, the problem with Flickr is that people can sometimes see what’s coming before you get the chance to finish composing your post.

*I’d originally put “Love in the third degree”, but I realised that I was getting murder mixed up with full thickness burns. I’m a simple soul.

If anybody needed a reason for the UK to pull out of Europe, a perfect example was on display for all to see across Eurovisionland TV on Saturday evening. A bunch of shitty little countries all ganging up against the UK, German, Spain and France to look after themselves and win the accolade of Eurovision Song Contest victor 2005.

Basically, loads of countries in Europe (plus Israel for some reason) enter a song to the Eurovision Song Contest, which is hosted by the winnng nation from the previous year. The songs are performed, then each of the countries (plus a load more not even in the contest) conducts a phone vote of their public (allegedly) to decide how points are allocated amongst the deserving songs. A maximum of 12 point is on offer in each round of voting, so a song can get 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 or 12 points. After all the countries report their votes, they’re totted up and the winner is proclaimed.

Just look at how the scores went from the final table for the 2005 contest (clicky).

You’ll see that all the Balkan nations vote for each other, then all the Baltic nations vote for their own neighbours (plus Russia), all the old Eastern Bloc countries vote for their mates. Cyprus always votes for Greece, Turkey always votes for Greece, Greece generally votes for Cyprus or Greece. No fucker votes for the UK because everybody hates Tony Blair. Nobody votes for Germany because they still haven’t got over the war. Nobody likes France because they’re a bunch of pigs.

Why don’t they just ditch the fucking dreadful songs and get all these countries to have a vote on who they like and who they don’t like. Then the big guns in Europe can get together and nuke the little shits that don’t vote for them. Virtually nuke them at least, by withrawing all their subsidies.

Bloody Europe, fuck’s sake.

Bastards.

Here are the news headlines from my local free paper, the Salford Advertiser, this week (click on the links to see the whole report). I felt sick as I looked through this paper when it arrived this morning.

Cop’s top ten SALFORD’s 10 most notorious families will be given their marching orders in a new get tough policy designed to take terror off the streets.
This comes after a man was beaten half to death by a gang of 14-15 years olds who he’d tried to stop throwing stones at his car.

Helpless deer is mutilated by gang of sick youths
EXCLUSIVE A GANG of youngsters pelted a wild deer with stones as the animal desperately searched for an escape route from a school playground in Pendleton.
This made me sick, absolutely sick.

Police reveal bat used in Croft killing DETECTIVES investigating the killing of dad-to-be Paul Croft have released a picture of a baseball bat used in the vicious killing.
A young dad-to-be was set upon by a gang of 20 or so youths (14-17 year olds) and beaten to death.

Firearm teacher to fight job loss A SPECIAL needs teacher who opened fire on teenagers using an air pistol has lost her job.
This teacher went to jail and lost her job after tackling a bunch of youths who’d been terrorising her and vandalising her property.

Pub vows to fight on after losing appeal for its licence BOSSES at the troubled Swinton pub where father-of-two Frank Buckley was so savagely beaten he later died, are refusing to admit defeat after losing an appeal for a new drinks licence.
Yes, a man who’d been out for a meal with his family was beaten to death outside this place – the perpetrators stamped and jumped on his head. They were each sentenced to about 5 years in prison, and are due for release within a couple of months (after serving about a year).

There’s no mention on the website issue of the the DIY cat trap that somebody had used to mutiliate local moggies.

Salford MP’s delight at re-election

In the same issue, Salford MP and junior Home Office minister, Hazel Blears thanked voters for putting her back in parliament. Great. The useless bitch and her equally fucking useless colleagues want to pull their fingers out and do something about the total scum that we are surrounded with. All they do is take our money and waste it, they talk about the causes of crime, but offer no real solutions.

I’ll give you a solution, two solutions: 1) Give the police and courts real powers to find and punish these bastards, and 2) do something to prevent useless fuckers having kids that they have no interest in bringing up properly. There are no disincentives to people who are incapable of even looking after themselves having child after child in this country. These people have no respect for themselves, no idea of responsibility, no idea of contributing to society. Yet they are allowed to breed and produce generation after generation of parasitic, lawless scum.

If you go to Hazel’s website, you can tell her exactly what it is that makes you proud to live in New Labour’s New Britain.

I want to emigrate. Will one of the Canadians nominate me please?

BBC NEWS World Asia-Pacific Powder mix-up fools sniffer dogs

This is great. Sniffer dogs in Australia somewhere are useless because they’ve only been trained to smell talcum powder and wouldn’t know what cocaine was if somebody came up to them and offered them a kilo of charlie. Apparently, the bag they were sniffing was supposed to be cocaine, but it somehow got switched for talc.

I of course have great affinity for any being with “Sniffer” in its name; these poor beasts are now a laughing stock, but they’re soooooooooooo cute. I could get one and train it to attack my parents every time they try to use talc! Although they’ll probably just whine a bit and sit next to them (the dogs, not the parents, although my parents do whine and sit down a lot too).

Talcum powder is horrible it’s one of things from your childhood that you assume has become extinct once you grow up. But no, it’s still there and people still use it. I don’t quite know what talcum powder is for – apart from making a mess all over the bathroom and making your skin feel all weird. In fact the feeling of talcum powder hands really goes through me; much in the same way as somebody scraping their fingernails down a blackboard does.

My parents still use it, but I honestly wouldn’t know where to start. And wouldn’t want to if push came to shove.

I need to fill up on caffeine before my brain wakes up properly. I don’t even think I’ve managed to swear anywhere in this post. Tsk.

Talcum powder indeed!

Personality tests are weird things, they attempt to categorise people according to their answers to a few confusing questions.

After a number of friendly accusations that I have Asperger’s Syndrome, I decided to take a personality test to see where my foibles would make me fit in. I’m not sure whether it was a Myers-Briggs, but that’s what I Googled for and I took the test at this place: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp.

Apparently, these are my attributes:

• Introverted 33%
• Sensing 12%
• Thinking 50%
• Judging 22%

And this makes me an ISTJ type person, sometimes known as an Inspector Guardian. This is type of personality has the following characteristics:

ISTJs are often called inspectors. They have a keen sense of right and wrong, especially in their area of interest and/or responsibility. They are noted for devotion to duty. Punctuality is a watchword of the ISTJ. The secretary, clerk, or business(wo)man by whom others set their clocks is likely to be an ISTJ.

His SJ orientation draws the ISTJ into the service of established institutions. Home, social clubs, government, schools, the military, churches — these are the bastions of the SJ. “We’ve always done it this way” is often reason enough for many ISTJs. Threats to time-honoured traditions or established organisations (e.g., a “run” on the bank) are the undoing of SJs, and are to be fought at all costs.

Hrrm, not sure what’s meant by “SJ” in that last paragraph. Apparently though, my personality traits liken me to Eeyore, George Bush Snr, and Thomas, Disciple of Christ.

As if they’d fucking know, for fuck’s sake. Load of bollocks. If anybody cares to take the test – and I hope they do – they’ll see how bloody stupid the questions are. They ask about things that I’ve never even bothered thinking about and there’s no “don’t give a flying fuck” answer option.

I’m just left resenting these things, I can’t see how they can be useful. Can you imagine it in a job interview? “So Tina, would you like to describe yourself to us?”

“Sure, it’d be a fucking pleasure! I’m an ISTJ type, which means you can set your clock by me.”

“Great! You’ve got the job”

Other types:

[ENFP] [INFP] [ENFJ] [INFJ] [ESTJ] [ISTJ] [ESFJ] [ISFJ][ENTP] [INTP] [ENTJ] [INTJ] [ESTP] [ISTP] [ESFP] [ISFP] [CUNT]

Even Google Adsense is having a laugh with this Asperger’s Syndrome business. Bloody hell.

Oh yeah, and just to show that it does work, this image was uploaded using Hello from Picasa. It’s OK for certain things, but Flickr does tend to have the advantage.

God I’m bored. I’m at work and I want to go home, but I’ve got to prepare for a tutorial that I’m giving to medical students this afternoon. Bollocks.

Just to fulfil my being as an connoisseur of the aroma of bakery, I think I’m going to play this game slightly differently. I’m going to try to think of an answer for each of the categories.

Here goes:

• If I could be a musician… I would be Tori Amos
• If I could be a doctor… I’d be THE Doctor and fight all the baddies in the Universe
• If I could be a painter… I’d be a painter of homes, as in painter and decorator
• If I could be a gardener… I’d be Capability Brown
• If I could be a missionary… I’d be Mother Theresa of Calcutta
• If I could be a chef… I’d be Nigella Lawson (although I know she isn’t really a chef)
• If I could be an architect… I’d be lost
• If I could be a linguist… I’d be the amazing Michel Thomas – amazing life story and now loaded from his language courses
• If I could be a psychologist… I’d be Michael Rutter, who did a lot of work in developmental psychology that was very interesting
• If I could be a librarian… I’d be 3rd Assistant Librarian Lyrael from the Abhorsen books by Garth Nix
• If I could be an athlete… I’d be Jesse Owens; anybody who could do that to Hitler is a legend
• If I could be a lawyer… I’d kill myself first
• If I could be an innkeeper… I’d be the one in Bethlehem, you know the one
• If I could be a professor… I’d be Professor Jackie Oldham of the University of Manchester – lovely woman, very well respected
• If I could be a writer… I’d be Philip Pullman: I’d kill to have the ability to produce the Dark Materials stuff
• If I could be a llama-rider… I’d be a much happier person, I’m sure of it
• If I could be a bonnie pirate… I’d be Pete the Ninja Pirate from Weebl & Jolt fame – Avast ye, scurvy dogs!
• If I could be a service member… I’d be in the bunch of people that first liberated the Nazi death camps. Not pleasant, I know, but to be there to witness the horror and hope must’ve been awesome
• If I could be a business owner… I’d be Mr or Miss Pret a Manger, even though I think they’re owned by McDonald’s now
• If I could be an actor… I’d be Doris Day
• If I could be an agent… I’d be Agent Orange. No I wouldn’t, that’s horrible. I’d be Zoe from Spooks.
• If I could be video game designer… I’d be the person that designed Tetris
• If I could be a comic book artist… I’d be either Goschiny or Uderzo of Asterix the Gaul fame. Failing that, Bill Waterson for his wonderful Calvin and Hobbes and the way in which he refused to cash in on commercialising his work through merchandising.
• If I could be a hooker… I’d be Keiron Cunnigham, who plays for St Helens RLFC (boom, boom!)
• If I could be a crack addict…. I’d be very sick
• If I could be a porn star…. I’d be very sore and rather embarrassed
• If I could be a mime…. I’d be the invisible box
• If I could be a domestic engineer… I’d be my mum
• If I could be a chimney sweep…. I’d be the Dick van Dyke character in Mary Poppins, but do the accent properly
• If I could be a masseuse… I’d have very sore hands
• If I could be a taxi driver…. Robert De Niro’s character in Taxi driver “You talkin’ to me?”
• If I could be a priest… I’d be my friend the Hamster, who I admire and respect immensely
• If I could be a fighter pilot… I’d be the one that finally shot down that bastard Maverick in Top Gun
• If I could be a homeless person… I’d be Cane from Kung fu
• If I could be a biker… I’d be dead by now
• If I could be a mortician… I’d be the Kenneth Williams character in Carry on screaming
• If I could be a horror film killer… Hannibal Lecter
• If I could be a movie writer… Steven Spielberg
• If I could be a muppet… Miss Piggy
• If I could be a fast food product… Proper English chips from a proper chippy
• If I could be a piece of office equipment… Trillion’s desk chair or her Emotiboard
• If I could be a head of state… I’d be the Queen, God bless her!
• If I could be a member of a boy band… Little Mark Owen from Take That – it didn’t matter that he was crap, everybody still loved him
• If I could be a Wednesday… I’d be today; there’s no day like this one
• If I could be a list… I’d be my first Christmas list, when I didn’t really know what was going on, but I put things down (like a crappy tambourine) and I got everything.
• If I could be a figment of someone’s imagination… That person would surely be very psychologically disturbed

I’d really like to pass this on to Ryan J and his mate Will, I think it’d be very funny. OK, I’d like to pass this on to… there’s nobody left! How’s about we got some sort of response from our mate Dave, Dalek or Borg?

I would like to add the following though and see if any of you lot have any ideas.

• Singer
• Famous inventor
• Comedian

My answers to these are

• Singer – Natalie Imbruglia; she’s gorgeous and very natural. Failing that, Divine, who’s (was) anything but
• Famous inventor – Mr Electricity
• Comedian – Victoria Wood