I don’t know why I was ever deluded enough to think that I hadn’t completely lost my faith in humanity. I spent years being bitter at the world, hateful of people, despairing of mankind’s attitude to his brothers and sisters, and the general lack of respect for the planet.

Then I took some pills for a while and then it all seemed OK, or at least they made it possible to accept the rubbish world we live in.

Seven years on and I’ve woken up again. And I know that I’m right to really dislike people. If you were to be asked whether you think the world would be a better place if a virus came along and wiped out every human on the planet, if you were really honest, the answer would have to be yes.

It’s not just the damage to the environment, the wars, genocide, poverty, pestilence, greed that in makes humans bottom of the pile of nice things on the planet (below spiders, creepy crawlies and cottage cheese), it’s the way people have no respect for one another.

What’s brought this on? Has Sniffy read of another outrage in Darfur? Religious hatred elsewhere? A man-made disaster somewhere else? No, nothing so big in magnitude. No, it’s just another occasion of somebody making an appointment to come and view this here house that we’re trying to sell and them not bothering to turn up, not bothering to cancel, just not showing up.

So what? Well, it’s nothing to them, nothing to anybody else, nothing really in the big scheme of things. But when you rush home from work to get the house sorted for the visit, delay preparing your evening meal because they’ve made the appointment for 7pm, when you do them the courtesy of taking the excitable dog out for a walk in the pouring rain so he’s out of the way while they’re supposed to be viewing the property, well that’s a big fucking deal.

I hate them.

I hate them all.

Rocky hates them too because he’s always made to go wandering the streets while we’re having viewings. Sometimes he doesn’t want to. Especially when it’s pissing it down like it was tonight.

I have come to the conclusion that people who want to live in this part of Manchester are fucking idiots. They can’t read, they can’t figure out a room’s dimensions from the figures. “Oh, this second bedroom is a bit small, I was hoping to fit myself, my wife, our five kids, and their grandparents here.”

From now on, I’m going to name and shame any fucker who makes an appointment to view the house but doesn’t bother to turn up.

Khan, Hussain, Jackson. I’m sure the list of shame will grow much longer before this house finally shifts.

Discomfort
The little plastic bit that cushions my specs on the bridge of my nose has fallen off. This is making wearing my glasses rather uncomfortable. This means that my allocated retail therapy funds will have to go on specs – a medical necessity – instead of an espresso machine (also a medical necessity, but not quite as necessary as something that will enable me to see).

Why can’t I just see? People with good eyesight have no idea how lucky they are. My eyes aren’t that bad, but it’s just that thing of not being able to when I wake up. Imagine how good it must be to open your eyes in the morning and everything be clear.

Hey ho.

Delia
I’m watching Delia’s How to cook on the Food Channel she’s shown three different methods of preparing pig swill so far. Courgette, feta and something else somethings. Blimey. It’s got egg in it too.

That’s the Saudi punishment for any woman found driving over there – or something not quite so severe, like forty lashes and being forced to wear a barbed wire bra for a month.

So, look at this defiant little minx. This is Wajeha Huwaider, who was filmed driving round Riyadh in protest at the Kingdom’s ban on women driving – no burka either. Tut tut tut.

No idea what she’s saying; she could be talking about the price of eggs at Asda for all we know.

Slated
I happened to come across US current affairs website slate.com by accident, but I’m so glad I did. Not only does it contain up to date commentary on a number of US and international news items, it provides reviews, media news, health, etc, it’s also a repository for a number of photo essays from the Magnum Photo group. Wonderful. And generally in black and white. Perhaps that’s where I’m going wrong with my attempts to be artistic.

Wii Olympics
I was having a conversation with colleagues while I was in London yesterday. Of course, London will be enjoying its Olympiad from this autumn and it seemed topical to bring the Olympics into our chat.

While postulating about possible exhibition sports in the London games, and any sports that might bring a few gongs to the Great Britain team. Tiddly winks was obviously high up there, bingo, greyhound racing and jellied eel pie eating were other possibilities. Then we had our moment of genius: Wii sports and Wii Olympics! Why the hell not? With internet gaming, we could simply have the whole Olympics online and so not have the bother of messing about with all that London rubbish. It’d save a whole lot of money for everybody in the UK and imagine what it’d do for reducing our carbon footprint!

So, come on Ken. You’re the one who’s bullying motorists at every opportunity, introducing tax after tax in the name of reducing the impact on the environment. Why not make a proper gesture and scrap the Olympics in favour of something not so utterly pointless and wasteful?

Doing my bit
Of course, I did my bit while I was down there yesterday. I didn’t cotton on at the time, but I don’t think my colleague realised that we had a tube ticket for our time there, and I thought she suggested walking to our destination because it was a nice day. It was a nice day when we set off from Euston, it wasn’t a nice day by the time we’d crossed the city and walked 4 miles to Imperial College.

My feet were so sore. It felt like somebody was pushing white hot needles through the tips of my toes into the balls of my feet.

So that was nice.

E-mail isn’t actually ruining my life; it’s a programme I’m watching on the telly at the moment. It’s all about people blaming having too many e-mails and it stressing them out at work. Bollocks. If you don’t want to be bothered by your work e-mails, check your messages in the morning, shut down Outlook, opening it up at lunchtime, close it down again, and open it up an hour before going home. Anything that doesn’t need a response, delete.

If people are desperate to get in touch, they’ll phone you.

The people I work with block out days in their diaries to respond to their e-mails. That’s like not answering the phone and then listening to your voicemails on a Friday afternoon when nobody’s around if you decide to call them back.

But hey, that’s work and this is Friday evening. THE WEEKEND!

Me and Rocky will be running wild and free tomorrow as Trump is out working until late afternoon. Rocky is really looking forward to being dragged around in the wind and rain.

Watching the Channel 4 News, there’s an article about some nasty arms dealer who has been arrested in Bangkok. There he is, surrounded by Thai commandos who are wearing baseball cap with “COMMANDO” embroidered on them. I’d love a hat with my job title embroidered on it. That would be so cool.

Where the streets are paved with red paint with congestion charge markings
I have to go to London on Monday and I’m not exactly sure where it is that I’m supposed to be going. I’ll get off the train at Euston and ask somebody I think. “How do I get to London? I’m from oop north and I can’t work out where the coloured railways are – I think I want a turquoise one, where can I find a turquoise train?”

I might need a turquoise train and a blue one, I’m not too sure.

I don’t even know why I’m going there, perhaps I’ll find out once I arrive.

Crufts
It’s Crufts this weekend. I blame two things for Rocky (not including Trump): Spaced and Crufts. Trump first got the idea to get a mini schnauzer after watching Colin in Spaced, this was then fed by watching Crufts last year. They only use the silver ones in TV, they only show the silver ones in dog shows. Of course, some might say that it’s institutional racism that keeps the black ones out of the public eye. The truth is the black ones are a bit like the beast in the attic; kept out of view of the public for health and safety reasons.

Think on.

Remember the Montreal Olympics in 1976? I think a lot of people in Montreal do because they’re still paying for it today.

Anyhoo, remember Emerson, Lake and Palmers’ Fanfair for the Common Man? It came on my MP3 player in the car just now. What a masterpiece! At least for about a third of it, then it goes all prog rock weird and it just goes on and on and on for about ten minutes longer than it should do. There are quite a few songs like that, Led Zeppelin did that too.

They don’t half go on, those prog-rock types. I don’t know who they’re trying to impress, perhaps they just get carried away with the moment, so many moments.

So busy!
I love it when colleagues complain about being so busy that they don’t even have time to put out the fires, yet they fill their diaries with about five meetings with the same person each week. In fact, today, I noticed the same three people in conflabs from 9.30 to 10.40am, at which point they came into a team meeting and talked to each other some more. This was followed by further discussions between the three of them from 11.15am to 12.30pm, and again later on in the afternoon. All three are supposed “senior managers” who seem to need to discuss everything at length rather than just getting on with it.

Annoying? Most definitely.

My favourite ploy of theirs is placing the “meeting in progress” post-it on the closed door of their office to prevent people disturbing them.

That’s leadership for you.

Gender queer
I’m trying to get my head around the concept of somebody being gender queer. Max in the L Word is gender queer apparently – a lesbian who has transitioned and is now a gay bloke. Trump is much more worldly wise about this sort of thing and, amused at my confusion, she just told me to google it.

What the hell, so long as somebody’s happy and harmless, eh?

But the L Word. I don’t know whether I’m really enjoying series 5 because I’m getting it about 8 months early and it feels “special”, or because it’s one of the best ones so far, but it’s bloody fantastic!

And the next series of the US Office starts in April too. Telly is my friend again.

Priscilla
Currently watching Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, what a great film. Classic Australian cinema, like so many others of the era. There was a time when you’d see virtually the same cast, in different roles, in everything that appeared in Australian film and TV. It seems to have gone quiet now that all their best actors have gone to Hollywood… or L’Oreal.

They’re worth it.

Vista
Now that I have my new laptop, I’ve been busy getting used to using Vista. It’s OK I suppose, with a few “oooh, look at that” bits. I think some commentators have said that it’s how XP was supposed to have been. Who knows.

Opera
Why is it that you can’t make out what people are singing in opera, no matter what language the thing is written in? And they complain about music these days.

I remember Loz using that on middle class parents, and it’s just as appropriate for those pious pricks Radiohead. Why? Because they won’t be playing Glastonbury this year because it’s really bad for the environment to have all those revellers travelling there by car since there’s no public transport to the place.

Oh fuck off! For fuck’s sake!!

I have no opinions on Radiohead’s music, I don’t know much about the band members – they seem fairly down to earth from all accounts – but give us a fucking break from all your bloody preaching.

Why do these people have to turn what’s the highlight of a lot of peoples’ year (not mine, it looks like my idea of hell) into an opportunity to get on their fucking soapbox? If you’re not going to play at the festival, just say so, or do like me, say nothing, I’m not playing either and you don’t get a song and dance announcement about it!

Could you imagine it? Sniffy has announced that she won’t be going to Antigua this year.

G-O-D!!!!

Makes me grind my teeth.

Easy open
Do you ever buy rice in those plastic bags that come with the little adhesive label to fasten the bag once it’s been opened? I think these bags are part of some conspiracy by a total bunch of bastards who are laughing at us. Why? Well, the bags are made of fairly brittle plastic and sealed with the strongest adhesive on the planet so you struggle to open them, pulling so hard that the bag splits, rendering the sticky “easy-reseal” label totally useless.

Yet another of life’s little disappointments that contribute to an overall depression that makes you hate the world.

You get some of these poor bastards in third world countries where day to day living is a struggle, where getting water can be a struggle, where they’re vulnerable to disease, famine, war. They may aspire to the trappings of our lives and what would they get if they attained those aspirations? They’d get depressed at how shit stuff is.

Bags of rice ruining your day, for fuck’s sake. Pathetic.

Spaghetti girls
Following my disparaging review of straight girls going gay last week, particularly Dawn Porter’s attempts at pulling a lesbian, it pleased me to hear this term in this week’s L Word.

Some girls are “spaghetti girls”: straight until they get wet.

Dirty bitches in that show, I tell you!

Retail therapy
I’m getting a new laptop, yay! While I was tempted to buy a Macbook Air – for a nanosecond – I figured I’d need something that would be slightly more use than a very thin door wedge, so I’ve gone for a midrange Dell, which might or might not be OK. We shall see.

That’s a reference to the US version of TV sitcom The Office, which is infinitely more watchable than the UK version that starred Ricky Gervais, who is Ricky Gervais in whatever he appears in. This wouldn’t be a bad thing if he wasn’t such an annoying twat, but Gervais’s presence in anything makes me want to pull my skin off from the eyelids down.

Despite Gervais being executive producer on the American version of the show, The US Office is brilliant in comparison to its British counterpart. And it’s actually funny, hilarious in fact.

And it’s pure coincidence that I discovered that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant are getting together to write a film. No doubt Gervais will be playing… Ricky Gervais.

Turd.

Maybe he’s born with it
Andy Burnham is MP for Leigh and also Culture Secretary. I don’t know much about him, but check out his lashes!

Well, it was Andy’s job to announce that plans for a supercasino here in Manchesterford have been scrappy dood. Some people (the city council) are furious that the deprived area of Beswick (where the big Asda, City of Manchester Stadium and National Cycling Centre have been built) will now not benefit from the hundreds of jobs that the casino would’ve brought to the area, along with organised crime and gambling problems. Instead, the area will get a few million quid investment for new “houses” that nobody who lives there can afford to buy.

Life Hacker
Trump spends many hours looking at LifeHacker. The Show us your go bag section invites readers to show the insides of their satchels, rucksacks, etc. These being techno geeks, you can imagine the contents:

• PDA
• MP3 player
• Moleskine notebook
• Laptop
• Digital camera
• Big headphones (never standard in-ear ones)
• iAnythings

So, thinking about my go-bag, what’s in Sniffy’s?

• 2 PDAs (Palm TX and an iPaq)
• Palm cable
• Credit card toolkit
• Creative Zen MP3 player
• 2 notebooks (one Moleskine)
• Work mobile phone (usually drained of battery power)
• 4GB flash drive
• 2GB flash drive
• Pen, automatic pencil
• Pair of gloves
• 14 tissues
• 2 Tampax tampons
• 4 ibuprofen tables
• Nail clippers
• 5 sachets of sugar
• Work ID card
• Carmex lip balm

So that’s interesting, I think I’m a geek. What’s in your bag?

Caaaaaaalm
Rocky is impossible to comb. He has issues with combs and grooming implements in general. It’s because of this that his groomer was instructed to take his fur right off when he came to clip him last week; the result is a bearded rat with big eyebrows.

I’ve ordered him some herbal relaxants from Petmeds online. Perhaps if we can settle him before ordeal by comb, he might start to get used to it. Or so I thought.

I got home from work today to find the dog bouncing about, having destroyed whatever package had arrived, with no sign of its contents. I spent an hour trying to find Rocky’s medication and was puzzled at the dog’s persistent bouncing – surely he should be calmer if he’d swallowed all that herbal valium? Most probably, but it turned out that he’d just shredded at padded envelope that he’d found lying around.

Little shit.

Top comedy put downs
Apparently the top 20 or so comedy put downs of all time have been published. I can’t imagine how hard that must’ve been.

That’s what she said.

There are some queer people out there.

And then there are some who pretend not to be queer when they are, and some who like the idea of being queer, but are straight.

Dawn Porter, “investigative” journalist extraordinaire, is basically a bit of a slapper; she loves men and claims to be a very sexual person. She claims also to be very straight, but she questions whether she might be a touch lesbian because she once had a threesome with a straight couple. Wanting to explore her sexuality fully, she decided to spend a month living with three gay women in their flat to see if any of their queerness would rub off on her… quite literally.

She was taken to the hottest lesbian bars by her new friends but came out stunned that none of the lesbians were remotely interested in her. I’m surprised that none of her temporary flatmates pointed out the fact that she was obviously straight, and quite unattractive – her long, painted fingernails an instant turn off with any gay woman. But what amazed me was her attitude that she could attract the interest of a lesbian because surely, all lesbians want the challenge of turning a straight girl?

Well no, there’s nothing worse than “straight girls” who want to fuck around and try a bit of gay sex behind their boyfriends’ backs, so anybody with half a brain would steer well clear.

But anyway, that was her for you. Surprisingly, she didn’t pull, and basically, she was only curious about sex with women because she seems to be a bit of a slag who’s exhausted the male population of London.

Apparently there’s a crisis in our curry houses: the price of rice has increased by 60% since last year and new immigration rules mean that the curry houses can’t employ kitchen staff from places like Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Now, there’s not much you can do about the global price of basmati, but why should blocks on immigration stop restaurants recruiting kitchen staff? Why can’t they employ people from the UK?

Could you imagine if there was an Italian restaurant here that refused to employ English people? Or anywhere that refused to employ Asian folk? There’d be all sorts of legal eagles suing people here and there because, well, it’s illegal. So why are curry houses allowed to be so discriminatory? Most people in the UK like Indian food, they can appreciate how it’s supposed to taste, and any eager young thing would quickly pick up the ropes in the kitchen, so why this exclusion of non-Asian staff?

I don’t know. If I had the answers, I’d share them, but hey, there you go.

Panic on the streets of Bridgend
Seventeen youngsters in and around Bridgend, South Wales, have killed themselves in little over a year – three have died in the past week, another body was found today.

What the fuck is all that about?

Some speculate that they’re part of a pact, or that they must all link together through some weird social networking site. Chances are there’s no link and the poor buggers are just depressed about having a really horrible accent. I should know, my accent is terrible and I’ve suffered from depression for years.

Shouldn’t joke about suicide, and I’m not really, but it’s a bit odd and you look for common denominators, it’s only natural.

I wonder if there’s a high rate of depression in the far north of Scotland…

Bottled it
Some twat, I think Labour MP Phil Woolas, has come out with some crap saying that bottled water is unethical.

Oh fuck off!

I’m sick of having ethical, organic, local, honest, fair trade bloody everything shoved in my face wherever I go.

In some cases (not round here) bottled water is the only palatable option, and let’s face it fizzy water doesn’t come out of the tap – well it does in London, but that’s not intentional or particularly safe.

But it comes down to freedom of choice, and I’m so fed up of these idiots abusing their positions of public office by imposing their own pathetic views on the masses. We’ve all got opinions about things, but we don’t get them publicised by the BBC in some crappy section on their website, so why should we have to be exposed to this nonsense by some nobhead politician who’s known in his constituency for nobbing some rough as fuck council estate bint?

Anyway, bottled water, it might not be “ethical”, it might not be cheap, but if people want to buy it and drink it, let them.

But we’re a funny bunch aren’t we? We’re quite justified in complaining about the price of petrol at over £1 a litre, yet many folk are happy to pay this amount for water, which they get from the tap. I suppose they’d be forced to think more about if they were forced buy 50L of the stuff at a time.

Excruciating
I think somebody has been sticking pins in a voodoo doll of me today; I’ve been experiencing waves of excruciating abdominal pains – so bad that they make my eyes water. They are best described as really bad poo pains, but without the poo. Terrible.

I think the ratatouille that I had for tea will either kill or cure me.

“Suck my dick, fuck face”
Imagine getting your restaurant bill and finding that as a one of the items on it? Somebody at Joe Delucci’s in Stoke did. I’m shocked and appalled of course, but also gutted that I don’t have the opportunity to do that sort of thing if people piss me off at work. Well, I have plenty of opportunity, but plenty of restraint… and I don’t have a dick.

Gillian Gibbons, the teacher arrested and jailed in Sudan for committing the unforgivable sin of allowing her class to call a teddybear Mohammed (you all remember?) has now got a job teaching in China.

Is she fucking stupid? Is she deliberately doing a tour of all the places on the planet with the worst human rights records? Daft cow. I understand that if she makes it through her stint in the Far East unscathed, she has a job lined up in Stornoway where she’ll be teaching the local kids how to spell, use capital letters and punctuation properly. Failure will lead to her being burned alive in a giant wicker teddybear on the beach.

She looks like the sort of person who should be on the cheese counter at Asda. I certainly wouldn’t trust her with anything that requires more responsibility than wrapping stuff in plastic and sticking a barcode label on it.

Some people eh?

At the mall on a diet pill
Sniffy is excited!

My favourite band, The B52s, have a new single out. Funplex, the album of the same name is out in March and I can’t wait. They’ve not recorded an album since 1992, so this is long awaited.

The band members have always looked a bit dodgy, but they’re looking almost embalmed these days. In fact, their heads look stuck on in that photo. Still, the new single is great, so I have high hopes that album will be worth the wait too.

Fucking Sainsbury’s, that hotbed of criminal activity and vice has introduced state of the art technology to counteract the elements of the underworld who might prey on their unsuspecting customers. Yes, as I was leaving the store in Salford yesterday, the electronic noticeboard at the car park exit flashed up my car’s registration number. What the fuck?

Why are Sainsbury’s tracking its customers this way? I suppose the fact that it’s the Salford store on the edge of Ordsall might say something, but come on, why do they spy on us? Do they link the data to other databases? Can they find out the customer’s name and match up their visit times to shopping patterns, gleaned from the Nectar or debit card? Why oh why oh WHY?

Did I turn back to pick up the in-store leaflet “Making our car park safer” that I’d seen, that would’ve been too easy. I e-mailed them to ask what was to do. I’ve not had a response yet. I guess their customer services department have been too busy laughing at me for most of the day. Good for them.

And Royal Mail are a bunch of arseholes too. I’ve been expecting a parcel from France (should’ve known better) that should’ve been delivered around the 20th of January. No sign. I contacted the sender and they checked the tracking thing and they were told that the package was awaiting signature for collection, presumably not too far from here. So I copied the sender’s message and other details into an e-mail to Royal Mail to see if they could track it down. Their response?

“I would like to explain that under the Universal Postal Agreement, any
enquiries regarding your item have to be initiated in the country of
origin. May I therefore suggest that you contact the senders and ask them
to provide their postal administration with the posting details. This will
enable an investigation to be made from the point of posting.”

It’s no wonder the fucktards at the post office can’t deliver stuff when they can’t even read. They’re probably from Stornoway.

Brrrrrrr
It’s actually a bit nippy; I suppose this is a consequence of it a) being February and b) being delightfully sunny during the day. It’s actually quite warm during the day, but nippy at night. And I could go on describing the weather and when it gets warm at night after a nice sunny day (usually from about May, but only if you’ve had a few days of temperatures in the mid twenties), but I’m rambling because I’ve lost my thread….

Right, that’s it. In a meeting the other day, somebody remarked that it was the middle of February already. It was at this point that I realised that more and more, I count where I am in the year by how many hours of daylight there are – anything less than 8 and I might as well be in bed.

And now it’s getting lighter and brighter, Sniffy is waking from her winter depression; I’ve had this one since last July. Joy.

But the other day, having driven to work in glorious chilly sunshine, I overheard a woman in the car park saying “This weather’s lovely, but I don’t really like it any warmer than this”. It was about 2°C. Stupid witch. Why don’t these people who whinge about warm weather just fuck off and die somewhere, like Stornoway? Idiots.