These things are brilliant for washing the dishes with:

Perhaps not those particular ones, those look a bit rubbish, but the proper ones are ace for doing the pots with. With nice hot water and good washing up liquid, they’re the best things for getting all the mush off your dishes, leaving them squeaky clean. You can use the abrasive edge to take off any dried on food, while the sponge helps the washing detergent foam up, making it go so much further.

On the other hand, these things are totally shit:

Unless they’re absolutely desperate, do people actually use these things to do the washing up? They’re useless! We’ve run out of washing up sponges and we’ve had to resort to dishcloths instead.

Dishcloths have two purposes:

• Cleaning the carpet after one of Rocky’s dirty protests
• Stopping water dripping over the end of the bath

RUBBISH!

But check this out. A whole site devoted to dishcloths; industrial ones! Those stupid, stiff ones that are half sponge, half cloth, wholly crap. You know, those blue and white stripy ones – I think they’re called J Cloths.

They could clear a whole aisle of this shite at Tesco and give it over to things like pickles, gadgets or hair products. I might write them an e-mail.

Cute sushi lunches
Talking of which, I need to contact Tesco about their sushi packaging. They’ve changed the packaging on their large sushi packs so now the plastic tray that the fishiness comes in contains a special little well to mix the wasabe and soy sauce in. Not a bad idea, you’d have thought, except for the fact that you can’t fit any of the bits of sushi into the well to dip into the wasabe.

What’s all that about then? That’s about people meddling unnecessarily, that’s what that is.

Cheeses strings?
What the hell are cheese strings? Are they supposed to be edible? Are they part of some government plot to stunt the development of our youth to prevent them from achieving, thus consigning them to a life on incapacity benefits, a new generation of Labour party voters?

They look awful… and so do the cheese strings.

Why can kids just eat cheese?

Says I, polishing off a packet of Fox’s Viennese Melts. Fuckin’ delish!

You know what it’s like when you’re so tired that it’s a real struggle to even lift your head from the pillow, but you know you have to drag your arse out of bed to go to work because you can’t phone in sick because you have to give a presentation and then when you’re there you desperately want to cancel the contact lens follow-up appointment you’ve made for that evening because you might as well wait until your new specs are ready to pick up so you phone them up to tell them but they tell you that your specs are ready so you might as well go that evening afterall even though you feel like you’re dying and the prospect of sticking contact lenses back in your pisshole eyes makes you feel physically sick?

Well, that’s how I feel.

The combination of lack of sleep, a slight cold, hormones, stresses (good and bad) means that Sniffy is very very tired at the moment.

But why so stressed?

Well, Sniffy has finally, after about five years of trying, FINALLY got a new job, starting in May. This means that I have to do shitty things like handovers to the morons I work with at the moment as well as start picking up new bits of information about the new job. So that’s good stress.

Another good/bad stress is… buying a house. We’re doing a part exchange on Trump’s place for a new build (Bellway). I think we’re getting a good deal. I have no idea about these things. It’s in the hands of solicitors and a financial adviser. I’m keeping my head down until I’m asked to sign a cheque or a contract and once all the savings have gone and the contract is signed, the bad stress will turn into good stress. I am naturally pessimistic and wary of things, especially things involving housing developers and solicitors, but we’ll see how things go.

The return of the neighbourly squeaky chicken
I hope Rocky will be happy in Bellend Towers. He’ll have to encounter something that he’s never had to face before in his short life: doors. HA!

He’s very happy at the moment; having chewed up all his squeaky soft toys so the stuffing has fallen out, I have resurrected his squeaky rubber chicken. I’d forgotten how much he likes it. It is VERY loud and I do hope our neighbours don’t get disturbed by its constant squeaking during the day while we’re out of the house. It would be such a shame if he did anything to piss them off.

On one side, we have the Asian couple with the small children. They’re OK in the main, but it can be a bit annoying being woken up at 4am by the man’s screaming down the phone to somebody in Lahore or Karachi or Islamabad (see, I do know the names of some foreign places outside Europe and North America!). And I’m sure the sofa propped up against their window hasn’t put off any potential purchasers of Trump Towers… no, not at all. Not that we haven’t printed off the information for the FREE PICK UP service from the council and given it to them twice or anything. No, we wouldn’t think of doing anything like that.

On the other side we have Mr and Mrs Fagash and their extraordinarily loud telly. I like the way I can hear what they’re watching in their living room from our bedroom upstairs. I like the way they have a visitor for a couple of hours, but continue to have a ten minute conversation in their open doorway while blowing cig smoke into our house. I love the bloke’s impression of a pig at an abattoir whenever he has an asthma attack in the bedroom adjacent to ours at 1am.

People eh?

15th April 2008
That’s today’s date. On this day last year, it was sunny with a temperature of about 23°C. Today, exactly a year later, it’s about 8°C max, with heavy showers. I had to scrape ice from my car’s windscreen this morning. It’s fucking freezing.

Maybe I’m just fussy, I don’t know, but if I have a salad, there are certain things that just shouldn’t be in it.

Fruit? Absolutely fucking not! I mean, come on, you’re having a nice savoury salad and some tit throws in bits of apple. Idiots.

So that really goes without saying and I think the majority of people with more than one braincell and an ounce of taste would agree with me.

But there are some other things that I cannot abide in salads:

Raw onions
Green, red or yellow peppers
Unpeeled cucumber

Check this out; another offering from Lyle and Shaw…

The salad itself is lovely; fresh mixed leaved, fresh juicy crayfish tails, fresh cherry tomatoes, accompanied with a rather nice Moroccan style dressing. But what the hell is going on with that added mix of what can only be described as NIGHTMARE.

For goodness sake, look at it all.

On delving deeper, I was horrified to find these!

They were quite tasty though.

Virgin
There’s something wonderfully fantastic about a fresh pot of lip balm or hand cream, untouched by anything, not a single mark on its perfect surface.

Beautiful. And yet once that lid is removed, it’s just a matter of time before its surface becomes broken, never to return to its original state.

Never again will that pot of Carmex be whole. Never again will it have that perfect smooth surface.

It’s because of this, that I find myself buying a pot of Carmex every time I see one. I must have ten of the things knocking about at the moment. Lovely.

It comes in tubes as well, but they’re not as much fun.

Twat of the week

I’m not saying anything, but if you want an explanation, click here.

Well, what a weekend! Actually, the weekend started on Thursday evening with an appointment with Stockport’s favourite housewife, Barbara Nice – that’s Barbara as in Streisand, Nice as in the biscuit – at her Hiya and Higher gig at the Lowry.

The thing about the Lowry Centre is that it has several theatres and performance rooms within it and the problem with us was that we ignored the ushers who were asking us which performance we were seeing. So, before finding the theatre that was showing this:

We burst into the theatre that was showing this:

Hey ho. Barbara was brilliant and, not surprisingly, the audience contained a high proportion of poofs. We all know how much we love our mums and an evening with Barbara nice is like spending an evening with your mum on acid.

Friday night we celebrated our 2nd anniversary… awwww. We went for a meal, which was lovely, but a bit pricey. Bloody restaurants using organic fair trade produce; why can’t they just use normal produce and knock 15% off the price? This was followed by a couple of drinks in my favourite gay (lesbian) bar, Coyotes, in the village. The girls who frequent that place clearly love themselves, but this makes it excellent for people watching.

Saturday afternoon
We were pleasantly surprised with a phonecall from our favourite Yorkshire poofs yesterday, telling us that they were heading our way and would we like to meet up for coffee. Of course we would!

So, within a matter of hours of leaving The Village, we were there again and back in the restaurant that charges for organic things when normal food will do.

Piggy was on form, giving us a breakdown on how Tazzy manages to satisfy him despite his tiny manhood.

Honestly, those boys!

Saturday evening
Saturday evening took us to a friend’s for dinner. The friend in question is a colleague of Trump’s and the other guests were also colleagues and friends of Trump’s, with the partner thrown in. Three men, three women.

Rocky came with us.

Rocky isn’t used to seeing men, especially not three at the same time, three gay men at the same time is something he’d never experienced. He tried to have sex with two of them and the other bloke seemed to feel quite left out when Mr Luvvaman wasn’t interested in humping his leg.

I was disgusted that our host even showed the little pup how to snort poppers

But, Rocky was up for it and he couldn’t resist the charms of Salford’s most eligible bachelor.

Dirty bastards, corrupting my little dog.

British Summer Time starts tomorrow. I’m still waiting for the British summer of 2007 to show up, so I don’t hold out much hope of us getting one in 2008.

We lose an hour’s sleep tonight when time jumps magically from 2 to 3am without us evening noticing. Of course, I’ll notice tomorrow morning when I’m tired as a bugger when I wake up, even more sleep deprived than I am already.

I woke early today because of builders clanking and banging as they removed the roof from a neighbouring property… at 7.30. Cunts.

So that was me, in a BAD MOOD.

What should you do when you’re in a bad mood? Something nice? Curl up in your PJs and watch films in bed all day?

That might have been nice. Instead, for some totally fucked up mental aberration, I decided that we should go to the Trafford Centre – on a very rainy, cold Saturday afternoon. It took 20 minutes to find a parking space, let’s just leave it at that.

Eye-eye!

The main reason for putting us through the Trafford Torture was to check out an opticians. Breaking my specs the other week was the catalyst for this – I’m due a sight test in June anyway, so I figured I might as well.

I don’t like having my eyes tested. I dislike any experience that involves me being in extremely close proximity with a virtual stranger, especially youthful, attractive women with low-cut blouses and full cleavages. I found “looking down to the right”, very difficult as this directed my gaze right into her puppies. “Looking down to the right” ended up being “looking down to the right, up, down, left, anywhere but her cleavage!”.

Jeez.

So, having got my breath back, I had to go through the whole “is number one or two clearer”, “is it better with or without” rigmarole. By the time they’ve switched to the alternative lens, I can never remember which is better to tell you the truth, they might as well be testing the eyesight of a goldfish.

Anyway, it turns out that I’m blind and I need new specs. Bloody expensive things.

The Orphanage

We’re off to a late showing of The Orphanage in a bit. I’m scared already.

For some reason, I subscribe to geeky e-mail alerts from ZDNet. Today’s included somebody extolling the virtues of Apple’s Safari web browser for Windows. Now, despite my loathing of everything Apple, Mac and the like, I’m all for making my web browsing experience faster and more pleasurable, so I downloaded and installed Safari to check it out.

Yes, it’s fast.

No, it isn’t nice to look at; the text looks all blurry and the menus are difficult to read. See:

So I’ll be sticking with Firefox.

Safari… so goody!
A BBC film crew has managed to film tigers in India by sticking remote controlled cameras to the trunks of specially-trained elephants.

Check out the article and some clips here.

Bloody marvellous.

Welcome to the jungle

The BBC news website’s Have your say section provides a forum for contributors to share their opinions about topical news items. There are certain rules to posting comments and most threads are moderated, meaning the all comments must be read and authorised prior to being loaded onto the relevant topic page. Such moderation means that comments get stacked while they’re awaiting moderation and it kind of defeats the object of having an open debate.

Anyway, I’ve recently had two comments rejected outright! I’m shocked and appalled. How can somebody as reasonable as myself have their opinions dismissed outright by some humourless lefty shitbag fucktard? Total cunts.

Here are the offending comments.

I’ve bought some new things; it has to be done at times, especially when retail therapy serves you better than any little blue pill or therapy session. So, what has Sniffy been throwing her money at?

Well, her love of espresso drew her to one of these:

But she didn’t have over £300, so she got one of these for £40 instead:

This is a De Longhi EC11. It does two cups of espresso at a time, really nice espresso, which is all I could ask for. It even does steam to heat and froth milk for latte lightweights. Fantastico.

In Heals yesterday, we happened up their kitchen section, where we came across these:

Available in three sizes, the Typhoon Capsule storage jars are lovely and reasonably priced. Another advantage is the aesthetic pleasure of them not having writing on them that tells you what’s supposed to go in the jar. You know the sort of thing; pastel-shaded tins with “coffee”, “sugar”, “flour”, etc written on them. These things are not quite as bad as crockery that instructs you to drink “coffee” from a certain mug, or eat “pasta” from a particular dish, (I’ve even seen crockery emblazoned with “plate”, “dish”, “mug”, etc) but they’re in the same league – “things with writing on them” – or “stuff for when you get alzheimers”, which is perhaps more appropriate.

Anyway, back to the Typhoon storage jars. They’re quite nice, but one of the ones we bought was a bit duff and the lid didn’t quite fit properly. Then while struggling with it, I sliced my thumb on the sharp edge. So now, instead of being emblazoned with “flour”, that particular jar is smeared with my blood.

The piece de resistance in terms of purchases is a new gadget – a diddy camera, to add to my collection of photographic equipment. I got one of these:

It’s OK. The main feature I was after with this acquisition was dinkiness for less than £150. I’d have liked a Canon, but when I buy Canons, I always get quite high-spec ones and they’re pretty expensive.

So, adding up the outgoings from recent shopping expeditions, including a Tesco visit on Thursday night and Sainsbury’s on Friday, the total comes to:

Coffee machine – £40
Tesco shopping – £130
Storage jars – £30
Camera – £140
Book – £12
Total – £352

Which equals a Francis Francis X1 coffee maker.

So you see, you can often save yourself a lot of money by going for one big purchase to satisfy that part of your brain that benefits from getting new things, rather than forgoing that and buying lots of little things in its place.

“Show me!”

How much does Mick Hucknall look like the result of a terrible genetic experiment that has inserted some of Mickey Rooney’s DNA into the embryo of a pig, super-aged the progeny (in conjunction with hourly ego massage) then stuffed it with botox.

Every morning this week, Radio 2 have been playing a trailer for a Simply Red concert that they’re broadcasting on Sunday. So each morning, I’ve heard the voice of a supposedly sexy woman sighing “I really love you”, followed by Mick Hucknall’s “Show me!” from the start of Something got me started. Imagine having the Rooneypig trying to seduce you. Martine McCutcheon did and she threw up in his dreadlocks.

Why do they do it?
I bought a sandwich for my lunch today. I had to go for turkey and bacon club; all the others either had onion on them, or they had halal meat on them, which really fucking pisses me off. Anyway, I opened my turkey and bacon club, prized out one of the sandwiches and it pulled a chunk of soggy bread from the other half:

You see, they can’t help but put bloody tomatoes on sandwiches…

Look at how much they use too:

The golden rule about tomatoes, lettuce or cucumber on a sandwich is, unless it’s to be eaten within half an hour, DON’T FUCKING DO IT! Especially if you then go on to cram it into a plastic sandwich container so the sogginess seeps into the bread and it all squashes together, it taints the flavour of everything and makes it all hideous. And that’s even before all the bloody mayonnaise and butter they spread on there by the tub full.

On the halal subject, I really object to the assumption that non-muslims are OK eating it; I don’t really like the idea of normal butchery, but I really object to halal and kosher butchery, it’s very cruel. I also object to religious superstition being imposed on what I eat (not mentioning the hot cross buns that I bought this evening), and I’d rather it wasn’t.

So, Lyle and Shaw sandwich makers, your sarnies are not that bad, but please, please, please: quit it with the hocus pocus halal meat, soggy salad veg, margarine and mayonnaise!

My fingernails are too long. Bloody things.

Apart from my usual “oh fuck off ” at the thought of everybody on the planet celebrating St Patrick’s day today, I have the added pleasure of announcing that they’re all wrong. We knew that anyway, but because it’s Holy Week this week, all celebrations of Saints’ Days have been cancelled. So, if you’re pathetic enough to celebrate St Patrick’s Day, and you haven’t done it already, then you’re too late and you’ll have to wait until next year to inflict your nonsense on the rest of us.

Turpy turpy my arse.

I’m sat here, waiting for the missus to get home and I can actually hear the questions on The Weakest Link from next door’s telly. At least the squealing baby on the other side has finally stopped wailing after not giving up all bloody night. I’m going to phone our estate agents and tell them to use these things as selling features.

Lay-zurrrr
Having mentioned losing the cushion from my specs the other day, I had a couple of helpful suggestions:

“Your optician will fix another on for free”

“Get your eyes lasered”

Imagine having laser beams for eyes…. or TASER BEAMS FOR EYES! My goodness, I’d be so happy.

Raymi the Minx feels the same…