My bloody eye is killing me. Contact lenses make the user so much more attractive. Yeah right, if red,weepy eyes turn you on, then contact lenses are great! And I defy anybody to say that they can see better through contacts over specs of the correct prescription.

Healthy it isn’t, but I feel I must add one more comment about my lovely neighbours. In the photo (below) you’ll notice that an item of clothing had been torn from the washing line in the strong wind and rain that’s been battering us since yesterday. I’ve just noticed that it’s been put back on the line! It beggars belief. Seriously, that washing has been out in the most horrible weather for about 3 days. Anyway, grumbling about shitheads isn’t good for anybody; pouring petrol through their letterbox and setting it alight is!

Digital photography is something I discovered this time last year and it’s brilliant; it’s revolutionised the types of photographs people take. In the past, photography was generally reserved for taking pictures of occasions, people posed in settings out of their usual context, it tended to provide a kind of skewed imagary cross-section of people’s lives. Of course, this was almost entirely due to the costs of consumables and processing, and also the time-delay between taking the photograph and seeing the result (which could turn out to be disappointing). Digital photography is instant, and without the additional consumables and processing costs, it gives the user scope to experiment and learn about photography without making expensive mistakes.

Why is it that some people insist on saying things like “We’re so mad here, it’s brilliant!”? It’s the sort of thing said by characters who have been parodied so brilliantly by the likes of Victoria Wood.

Another one is “I’m being good” or “Yes, it’s a low-fat yoghurt and Rivita for lunch!”, to mean that somebody is avoiding treat foods because they’re watching their weight. But why is avoiding treat foods “being good”? A treat is just that, a treat: something you have that’s not necessary for survival, but is a bit of a luxury to add a bit of enjoyment to your day. I think “being good” shouldn’t mean “being completely miserable”. Surely, having a healthy diet and lifestyle must include things like the odd packet of crisps or a chocolate bar every now and again? One of the most annoying things about people who have spent all of their adult lives dieting is their obsession with those who have had some success at getting in shape. And herein lies the answer to the relative success or failure of people who want to get in shape, or at least the way I see it is. Those who are constantly battling with their weights are, to varying degrees, obsessed with dieting – addicted to it I reckon. However, those who have some success in changing their bodies to their liking are probably not that worried about things on such in such an intense manner: a decision is made to change something/s about their lifestyle and they stick to it, rather than following one fadish diet after the next. It’s all a matter of degrees.

People who leave their washing out for days on end in all sorts of weather conditions are utter scumbags and they should be shot. They’re the same sort of people who claim incapacity benefit for “depression”, “stress” or “back pain” all their lives so they never have to work and can get a house for free plus all the additional freebies that go with it. All paid for by poor bastards who struggle on by, working long hours with nothing to show for it. Working long hours and getting up ridiculously early, but not getting to sleep till late because their scumbag neighbours are up decorating their free houses with stuff that’s paid for by the poor old worker. They’re just basically stupid, lazy, inconsiderated, down-right nasty fuck-ups who should be rounded up and shot.

I also like the primary-coloured playground furniture and other garden ornaments here. Ahh, the sounds of the children playing (screaming) in the summer and the cackling of the harpees as they enjoy a barbecue and drink on their patio, which simply must be accompanied by very loud music (just to rub it in as I get home from a 9 hour day at work on those warm summer afternoons). All paid for by the British tax payer of course. This garden has been put together and is tended by somebody who never works, but who I understand claims incapacity benefit for having a bad back. I suppose filling out all those benefit forms and striving to make as much collective noise as possible must be very stressful and they probably get a few quid for depression too. Bastards.

Bastard firewalls are a pain in the arse. Having just upgraded Zone Alarms (why oh why do I do these things?), it seems that it needs to learn which internet sites are allowed. To do this, it blocks everything until you’ve repeatedly reloaded the page and it finally cottons on that the BBC News website is safe to view. And all this is because some little shits around the world have nothing better to do than cause trouble by trying to hack into people’s machines.

Fingernail clippings go everywhere. Surely somebody can invent something that clips nails and catches the clippings rather then the bloody things letting fly into your coffee, or landing somewhere and hiding themselves until their discovered by an obsessive-compulsive visitor.

Well, after a week or so of techno problems, the misery seems destined to continue: no internet access at home, while here at work, we’ve lost a lot of functionality because of a fire at the main server building. They have this daft system where people’s profiles and data are stored on the one server at a central site so users have to log-on to the network to do any work. If the network goes down, we all go shopping for an hour! I just got a bargain Nike top for the gym for a tenner from T K Maxx.

Car colours
There are far too many silver cars on the road. This is probably because most cars look very good in silver. However, here are some other car colours that are very attractive: metallic mustard/gold, blue, maroon, and not forgetting, black (which I find particularly sexy). I’m talking the Audi paint jobs here because they’re lovely, particularly the paint jobs for the A4 convertables.

A survey said that people find drivers of silver, black and red (I think) cars most attractive – in that order. Makes you wonder what proportion of cars on the road are silver, black and red… Perhaps the government will introduce quotas to bring about equal proportions of car colours. Imagine being last in line and getting white or green? I had a white car once. By the time it reached the end of its life, it was “Manchester white”, or cream, as it’s more commonly known. Stupid colour for a car.

Trade offs
Living on a budget, as most people have to, there’s a constant trade off when planning what to spend hard-earned money on. I go for real things – tangibles they call ’em – all the time, and I always put a luxury item in terms of tanks of petrol since this is my biggest outlay each month (after debt repayment). So, a week’s holiday in the sun is 3 months’ worth of petrol and this can translate into the tangibles: 80GB hard drive; 256MB RAM; DVD-RW drive; a pair of Timberland roll-top boots AND an iRiver personal jukebox. It’s no competition really and it looks like I’ll be staying in England for another year.

My ongoing technological problems would’ve had paranoid people reaching for the tin foil and wrapping their houses in it in the belief that all their systems were under surveillance from the spooks!

I’m suffering java problems on my PC here at home (and I’m not talking spilt coffee in the keyboard), file download problems on my machine at one work base and hotsync problems at the other. Such things shouldn’t get to you; the machines still work alright, they’re not functioning optimally, but there are ways around the problems. It’s just so goddam annoying when you know there’s a little problem and it becomes an all-consuming part of your life until it’s resolved. And the solution is never a simple one, or should I say, the action taken (by me) is always very drastic – sledgehammers and nuts, that kind of affair. I’m having javascript problems here, therefore I need a new computer. I can’t hotsync at work, so I obviously need a system rebuild and a new PDA.

I changed my last car because the internal blower fan had lost its oomph and I couldn’t be bothered to get it fixed. It was also due an MOT, road tax and a wash. Quite sensible when you think about it.

There’s probably a name for people like me, like a medical condition. However, the best one is probably “twat”.

Cats are strange creatures. There’s one on the desk in front of me. This particular model is OK because he tends to lie down and keep still, as opposed to another one of the beasts who insists on doing caged tiger prowling up and down the desk in front of the PC monitor and all over the keyboard. Max’s nose is dripping; he’s a bit trashed because he’s been on the catnip for the past couple of hours.

Online shopping can prove to be a frustrating and disappointing experience if your happen to be looking for something that’s quite difficult to get hold of.

I’m a bit fed up.

In the words of 2 Unlimited, there’s no-no, no-no-no-no, no-no-no-no, no-no, there’s NO LIMITS to the frustration that technology can heap on a person. With the internet, as websites become ever more sophisticated, you never know whether there’s a problem with a site or a problem with the settings on your machine. In truth, there’s probably no problem with anything, but by the time you’ve pissed about trying different security settings in Internet Explorer and Norton, Zone Alarms and whatever other things you have protecting your machine, you’ve completely mashed up your system and broadcast all your credit card and banking details to the world.

There’s a German rock band called Rammstein, they have all flamethrowers and stuff in their live acts. Now, there’s a health and safety disaster waiting to happen if ever there was one!

Thinking about the I hate my flatmate blog, it’s quite easy to construct a blog of things that really piss you off about the people you live or work with. All you have to do is take every day goings on (or occurrances if you prefer the non-ranting alternative) exaggerate them a little bit and write about them with as much anger and as venom as you can muster. Today’s problem with John Doe’s flatmate was that she’d left a bit of jam and a few breadcrumbs in his margarine. Well, excuse me, but when you have to live with my parents, that’s nothing buster!

I once had a housemate who invited her dolescum boyfriend to live with us FOC (without asking us) and they’d cook porridge on the stove each morning. They’d cook porridge in the smallest pan they could find and let the stuff bubble all over the cooker. And then they’d leave it. Till it baked on. Really, really hard. Instead of writing blogs about them, we used to take direct action like throwing away their dirty pots after they’d been left in the kitchen for three days. It got the message across. And they were really noisy when they had sex – theirs was the bedroom directly above mine. “Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeith!!!!!!!!!!!!!” He was really skinny and he thought he was an artist and that work stifled his creativity. Lazy fucker.

We also had a housemate who had the attic room (it’s always the attic room) in a different house. The bathroom was on the same floor as her bedroom and we could hear her talking to herself in different voices as we’d go up the stairs. That was scary, especially during the heightened emotional state that everyone was experiencing during finals. I had a walk-in wardrobe that was sort of beneath the stairs and I once dreamt that she was a witch who had a secret passage from her attic coven into my wardrobe. That was on the day of my final final exam: I’d gone to bed exhausted in the afternoon after the exam; I was woken by that dream and threw up immediately.

Housemates are fun. I think people in that sort of situation should make the most of all those irritations because it gives you something to look back on when you’re finally settled in a place of your own where the kitchen bin is emptied when it needs emptying, where there’s always toilet paper, where it doesn’t persistently smell of curry or garlic or onions, and where you don’t get slug trails up your cooker because there’s a three day-old chilli con carne sat on there.

Lodgers, on the other hand, are a complete fucking nightmare. Lodgers want to be housemates, yet the lodgee just wants money and to never set sight on the lodger.

Things I hate about my Flatmate

Fantastic! If only there’d been a forum for me to vent my spleen when I had a sponging twat of a lodger a few years back.

I thought it timely to introduce a post with cakesniffing relevance in honour of this blog’s name, so I’d like to pay tribute to the very “in” volumes that have emanated from the typewriter of Lemony Snicket. Why cakesniffer? Well anybody who’s read the Unfortunate Events books will have come across this term in the 5th of the series, The Austere Academy, where Handler brings in the delightfully vile Carmelita Spats in the Prufrock Preparatory. Carmelita is basically a stuck-up, spoilt bitch and a bully who gets worse as the stories progress and she uses “cakesniffer” (and its derivatives) as a derogatory term for just about anything. Normally, we’re led to believe that bullies always get their come-uppance, but there’s no sign of this yet and Carmelita is wonderfully horrible in the latest (11th) offering, The Grim Grotto, where she insists on performing her “tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian” dance recital at every opportunity – fantastic. But this is the problem, isn’t it? Through our childhoods, we’re generally taught that such behaviour is unacceptable, that nobody likes spoilt kids, that we can’t always get what we want – this is usually reinforced with a slapped arse and, in all honestly, a good smack on the bum is an excellent cure for brattishness. However, wouldn’t it be brilliant if we could get away with being Carmelita (“Are you deaf as well as cakesniffy?”)?

There are various websites related to the Snicket books and The Quiet World (http://www.thequietworld.com/books/funnyquotes.shtml) has a load of entertaining quotes from the series. In addition, a good synopsis of the first 11 books can be found at Muggle net – a Harry Potter fan site.

Veggielesbianism is a term coined by Fat Fighters leader, Marjorie Dawes in Little Britain, it’s quite funny. Vegetarianism is so civilised compared to eating meat; I hate the idea of farming animals and transporting them to abattoirs and slaughtering the poor little things. I love meat-free foods, I really enjoy meat substitutes – I’d love to go veggie, it’s so much more healthy, but I can’t. Pathetic, isn’t it?

There’s something not quite right about listening to Christmas songs in February.

Squeezing blackheads and spots, particularly other people’s, ESPECIALLY greasy men’s, is one of those divine things that never ceases to bring great pleasure. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes; you can measure the satisfaction against many criteria (wiggliness of the blackhead goo, splatter pattern of spot goo, whether the “seed” of the spot is released on the first attempt, number of refills); and it’s an activity that can be done alone or shared with friends, lovers, family members. Fantastic!

Of course, related to this is “draining the cat’s abscess”: cats get into fights, they get bitten, bites get infected without you noticiing, big abscess bursts while you’re stroking kitty. And my God, do abscesses go on!!! Unfortunately, they also stink to high heaven, so you need a pretty strong stomach for that particular activity. They also have the associated costs of vets’ bills for proper cleaning and medication, so the pleasure is lost somewhat by the financial implications.

Smelly farts. Now, this is a weird one. Why do we like to smell our own farts, yet are sickened by those of others? Odd, isn’t it?

Gooey, post-cold snot. It’s great at the end of a bad cold when your sinuses finally start to clear and you get productive snot: that really gooey, yellow/green/bloody stuff that leaves your head clear as it makes its exit. You know it’s disgusting, but you just can’t resist having a look. Another great nasal pleasure is the post-nosebleed blood clot. If you have a bad nosebleed and have to hold a pack under your nose to absorb the blood, when you remove the pack, there’s often a huge blood clot that pulls away with it. You can feel it coming out from your nasal passage and it feels GREAT! After a few minutes, there should be the confidence for a good nose-blow and this often results in excellent bloody goo release too. It’s that instant of sudden freedom from the suffocation that had been caused by the clot (or snot): in that second, you sudden come alive again and it’s as if your brain can breathe too.

Gooey, post-chest infection phlegm. Again, you shouldn’t look, but you do, don’t you? There are different stages of this stuff. When you’ve been really poorly and it’s just coming up, it’s sort of dark green, olive-coloured and it really, really hurts. It also smells bloody terrible and you can sort of taste it as you breathe, but you can’t do anything about it. Yak.

Last, but not least: big, massive poos. They’re just the best thing in the world and I can’t imagine what it must be like to only go every now and again. I love the Bristol Stool Score, and there should be a pic of this posted somewhere on the b-log (log!) if I’ve managed to use picassa properly.

Filth, pure filth.

This is great! 

That’s how it feels sometimes. Especially now, having just ordered a pair of orthotic insoles to help prevent the pain I get in my crappy feet when I exercise. This is very probably metatarsalgia, apparently, although there’s the possibility that it’s Morton’s Neuroma and the likelihood of this being the problem is increased because of my squished feet and also the symptoms that I get (see http://www.spinalhealth.net/inj-foot.html if you’re interested). It’ll be a 24 hour girdle and incontinence knickers next. You know, the type of things you see advertised with crap 1950s-style black & white diagrams in the Sunday papers, or those daft little catalogues that accompany them. I don’t remember what age I’d reached when I looked at those catalogues and for the first time thought, That looks good, but I know I’m there now. The Kleeneezee book is great too.

It beggars belief, but there are Eastern European-looking girls walking the streets of Manchester (Curry Mile in Rusholme) who carry bundles that they claim to be babies; they come up to you, holding out their hands, begging for money. Arseholes to that! There was one this evening and she was carrying a bundle of something, but it sure wasn’t a baby. I gave her a very stern and angry “No!” and brushed her off. I’ve known sympathetic fools to have handed over cash and been told it wasn’t enough because it was less than a fiver. Round ’em up and send ’em back. Bloody thieves. That sort of behaviour is absolutely unacceptable and there’s no doubt that these lasses are essentially working for pimps. Disgraceful. If nobody gave them anything, they’d soon give up and piss off. People are too soft and stupid in this country.