People who wear watches tend to wear them day in, day out and never give them a thought until the battery needs replacing or the face gets destroyed in a drunken fall. But watch straps are disgusting things: over time, they accumulate bits of skin and God knows what else between the links, on the back and around the crown of the watch itself.

Dr Cakesniffer sports a Seiko these days, although she did favour a Tag Heuer for many years. The Tag Heuer has a rotating bezel and this is a great dirt trap, especially for people with lab-based jobs who wear powdered latex gloves.

Let’s see what happened when Tina decided to treat her Seiko to a bath today…

This is what it looked like to start off with. I think this could be about 3 months’ worth of cack.

The watch was suspended in a solution of fabric detergent and the effects were immediate; the dirt is visibly dispersing in the third frame.

After an hour or so and a quick rinse, the watch is much cleaner.

Unlike the bathwater:

Only just got up after a codeine-induced lie-in.

After conducting a little experiment in her virtual laboratory, Dr Cakesniffer presented her results to her peers in the Blogosphere:

Introduction
Weblogs (“blogs”) provide contributors with the opportunity to project their ideas, present their work or create online journals via the a user-friendly interface of a personal webpage. The quality of blogs is variable and, although no systematic reviews of blog quality exist, anecdotal evidence suggests that most are poor quality, incomplete, and ill thought-out piles of crap. It was therefore timely to conduct some preliminary work in order to collect pilot data that will inform protocol development for a larger study.

Methodology
All blogs currently represented in the Cakesniffer blogroll, plus a selection of others, were visited sequentially. After the pages were allowed to fully load, the “Next blog” button was pressed in order to activate the migration from the named site. The resultant pages were viewed and the urls recorded.

Results

Angry Chimp > http://mkumanipulators.blogspot.com “MKU Manipulators”

The fridge-mag.net > no next blog button

connielingus > http://deanmichael.blogspot.com “Sisyphus today”

pissoff > http://eleternodejavu.blogspot.com “El eterno deja vu”

Trillobites > http://scifipundit.blogspot.com “Sci-Fi pundit”

Walls come tumbling > not blogger

Karentertainment > http://fatdans.blogspot.com/ “Dan’s poker story”

Aasmodeus > http://ummlayla.blogspot.com “The Egyptian’s wife”

How can it seem so right? > http://chiangi-san.blogspot.com “Chiangi”

Cakesniffers beware! > http://ieouaarticlesofliberty.blogspot.com “Articles of liberty”

Dreamer’s reality > http://speedating.blogspot.com “Speedating”

Idiot roommate blog > http://top-mortgages-info.blogspot.com “The mortgage guide blog”

Why oh why must everyone have a blog? > next post button
not operational because of making poverty history banner

Blog convict > http://manifestomusical.blogspot.com “Manifesto – musical”

Post secret > no next post button

Half an identity > http://all-about-golf.blogspot.com “All about golf”

The table shows the originating page and “next blog” for each blog in the Sniffy Blogroll. The “next blogs” were generally not very interesting, some consisted of advertising sites, none warranted any action other than copying the url and blog title.

Conclusions
Most blogs are shit. How I found Angry Chimp amongst that crap is beyond me.

Next time you’re visiting a blog and you think “This is really good”, tell the author and tell your mates.

Yes, art as in “art, dahling!”, not ART as in “assisted reproduction technology”. How sad is that?

Personally, I think a lot of art is pretentious crap that’s produced by egotistical wankers. “But it enables you to gauge how the artist feels about a particular subject matter”. Why the fuck should I be interested in how some shithead interprets his or her feelings about something? Why can’t they just say it like anybody else? Tossers.

I don’t get art. My idea of hell includes a visit to an art gallery before an evening at the ballet or a poetry recital. Poetry???? Fuck.

Design, however, is great. Design makes us want a particular one out of lots of possible somethings – functional objects mainly. Design incorporates aesthetics, ergnomics, and lots of other “ics”. Design is clever. Take Alessi as a frexample. You get a load of things in your kitchen and Alessi’s designers take these things and do wonderful things to them to make them fun, more interesting – ornamental even, but functional all the same. Alessi put the fun into functional. Oh dear, my sincere apologies for that one.

Photography is great, I love it. Photography captures the moment. But simple changes to the camera settings can give quite different results. For example, if you don’t put the flash on, images may be blurred since the exposure time lengthens to allow more light in. (That was a piss-take, btw). One of the best things about photography is Photoshop. Look what I’ve put together:

I uploaded this using the new feature in the Blogger compose window

Now, after two posts in one evening, I’ve exhausted my subject matter for the entire weekend.

This one, Ed?

I love Arthur’s face on this one. He’s desperate for companionship from the big lump of fishy-smelling feline on the wall.

By popular demand! Edwaado wanted this pic (I think).

That Arthur is a bit of a character, it must be said.

It’s your mother!
Mothers are great. You love them, they love you. You annoy them, they tell you off. They can be the most terrifying creatures on the planet. They can also be the most irritating.

I don’t know why, but when they get to a certain age, they go daft. They become completely unreasonable. They don’t listen. They never shut up.

Some of my mum’s favourite ways to irritate me are: saying “I imagine” and”It’s ready when it’s ready”; and by moving bits of cutlery, salt and pepper pots and anything within her reach around the table while we’re sat round after a meal.

You can be sat reading, quietly enjoying the celeb mags that come with the Sunday papers; Mother will be in the room, reading one of the papers and you’ll get “Tut, tut, tut, it’s always the same…” Knowing that responding will get you embroiled in an argument with your mum’s logic, you keep still and pretend not to have heard. A few minutes later, “Did you read this about the [whatever]?” Even if you say you have, she’ll go on to recount the entire newspaper report and add her own editorial.

There’s no possibility of watching anything on the telly in her company for the constant running commentary. She even repeats what’s just been said in the news, despite the fact that you’re sat next to her and watching the same broadcast.

A few months ago, she thought she’d been caught speeding by a speed camera: “When will I hear anything?” I told her it usually takes about a month.

“How much is the fine?”, she went on.

“About £60 and 3 points on your licence.”

“Sixty pounds? And it takes about a month?”

“Yeah, you’ll know in a month. And there’s a 3 point endorsement too.”

“Sixty pounds, that’s terrible. As least I won’t have any points on my licence, it was only about 35mph in a 30 zone.”

“For the THIRD TIME, THERE WILL BE THREE POINTS ON YOUR LICENCE TOO!!”

“Oh, so you only get points if it’s your third speeding offence?”

Fuck me!

Slo-mo Dad
My dad is the slowest man alive. Everything he does is in slow-motion. Watching him eat is painful (in fact, listening to him eat is pretty bad too): he’ll pile as much food onto his fork as possible, then lift the fork very slowly while lowering his head and opening his mouth very wide. The fork goes into the mouth extremely slowly, but he still manages to drop half the stuff off it (this is particularly bad with spaghetti), and then he chews, and chews, and chews. Needless to say I leave the table as soon as I’ve finished.

I’ve finally had enough and done away with them. It wasn’t difficult, I just turned the fire’s gas supply on while they were dozing. Shame about Otto.

This is what happened when Arthur (wabbit) tried to introduce himself to Merlin (cat). Both of these animals have the privilege of living with Trillion.

Observe how the feline retains a height advantage at all times. How the lupine party in the dance desperately tries to get closer, to gain the cat’s trust, to become his friend…

Merlin is the wimpiest cat on the planet. He’s a bit of a prima donna too. Not like any of my gorgeous specimens, they’d have ripped the rabbit’s head off within 30 seconds!

Well, it looks like they’ve been VERY busy.

Stealing my name and then doing sod-all with it. Bloody bastards.

I love oranges; I eat about three every day. But why do they have to be such bloody hard work? You spend ages peeling the bastards, the juice burns your skin and squirts in your eyes, you get bits of pith under your nails and you don’t half hurt your thumbs as you try-very-hard-to-get-the-very-tight-skin-off.

Phew.

You get so stressed peeling them that you need a lie down afterwards – you don’t realise that you’ve been holding your breath during the procedure.

Getting the peel off is only the first part; prizing the things into segments can result in further showers of citric acid and juicier ones sometimes fall apart completely.

You don’t get that sort of trouble with a Twix.

Parents and crap food
My parents buy good fresh food. However, they aren’t the richest folk in the world and they’ll generally go the for cheaper alternative over certain things. These compromises can sometimes send me spinning into a rage.

• Bacon: I don’t eat bacon that often, so when I do indulge, it has to be proper. Imagine the disappointment when I discover that Mother has bought some cheap shit that falls apart wehn you try to separate the rashers. Not like Trillion, she treats me properly.
• Salsa dip: We had fajinas the other week and Mother ruined them by buying cheap crap salsa dip, rather than proper fresh salsa. Processed crap like that should just go straight in the bin without even being opened. Disgusting.
• Apples: Dad is an expert selector of oranges, melons and tomatoes, but he is utterly rubbish at finding decent apples. I don’t know why: I got to Tesco, pick up a bag of Braeburn and there you go – delish apples for all to enjoy. Dad? I’ve no idea what goes wrong, but he buys “Braeburns” that are the most powdery, disgusting, horrible things you could imagine. RUBBISH!

And they wonder why I’m grumpy.

An edit for illustrative purposes

Here is today’s sac des fruits:

Here are my hands after battling one of the oranges:

Here is the orange:

Here is the apple after I bit into it. Note the texture of the flesh – powder!

BBC News: Multiple blasts paralyse London

It seems that London has been targetted in a series of terrorist attacks this morning. No doubt the outrage felt by millions will be expressed all over the place, so there’s not much that can be added to the sentiments of others, just suffice it to say that I echo them.

Terrorists are cunts, but what they have to realise is that they’ll never be able to kill all of us and so long as we maintain a normal way of life, they’ll never win. Simple as that.