i am sparticus: Words

Naming and Shaming

This is a public service announcement:

Eating before 9:00am at restaurants in Ipswich is not a good idea. The following shops that promise cooked breakfast do not open until 9:00 at the earliest:

• BHS


• Littlewoods


• Debenhams (previously opened at 8:30 but has put the time back to 9:30 as of late)


• Woolworths


• Reflections

On top of that, Woolworths serves the nastiest breakfast I have ever had the displeasure to eat. The bacon tasted of nothing but salt, the eggs weren't runny and the mushrooms tasted like plastic that had just been washed in lemon fresh Fairy Liquid. On top of that Tomato Ketchup was being charged at 10p a sachet. I am not angry, I'm just seeking to make my point known.

When Using A Stool Illustration

If you are speaking and ever have to use (for whatever reason) an illustration about how a stool has to have three legs or it'll fall over then be warned; some smart kid will always say "Milking stools only have one leg". This effectively ruins your illustration and makes you feel stupid and seeing as a kid's heckle just ruined your talk that's fair enough. But how to respond? The best way is through the classic speaking tactic of making the other person look stupid by being witty: "Milking stools only have one leg" "So do toadstools, and you wouldn't want to put your weight on that now would you?". Whatever you do though, don't add "tubby" at the end. They are just a kid after all and it's probably glandular.

Musical Baton Type Thing

Woot! Meme!, passed on from Ellie.
Total volume of music files on my computer:
8.98GB (2195 songs, 6.2 days worth of music)
The last CD I bought:
Make Believe - Weezer
Song playing right now:
Say It Ain't So - The Deftones
Five songs I've listened to a lot recently:

• Sunday Bloody Sunday - U2


• Best Of You - Foo Fighters


• Glitter and Trauma - Biffy Clyro


• Hey Jude - The Beatles


• Retreat! Retreat! - 65daysofstatic

Five people I'm passing this on to

• David


• Matthew


• The Dane


• The Grey Kid


• Doug

Thunderbirds Are Go

When I did the whole 'Top Five Top Fives of 2004' thing earlier this year there was some relief that top fives only consisted of five songs. Obvious I know, but when you're trying to retain some dignity and your number six choice is 'Thunderbirds Are Go' by Busted then you really start questioning the way maths works just to be sure you're right. What's changed? '' 'When you're trying to retain some dignity...'''; I gave that up a few weeks ago as a hopeless cause. The thing that makes Thunderbirds Are Go such a fantastically awesome song is that it's not ashamed to be completely pop. It's like when the guy at the record company rang them up and told them about it, they thought 'Writing a pop song for a cheap kids movie designed to cash in on the brand created by someone else? Awesome! Let's corporately sell out!' and then proceeded to do it with such aplomb that they made Courtney Love look the model of 'keeping it real' restraint. The lyrics are simultaneously horrendous and absolutely fantastic. 'Things always look so cool when spaceships come out of the pool' 'the boys are back in town, no strings to hold them down'? Genius! They shouldn't be good but somehow they are. But the thing I think that makes the song is the use of the original theme tune in the song. I admit to being a sucker for that sort of thing, bringing in other pieces of music to compliment your own (Six by Seven's version of 'I Believe in Father Christmas' (a cover version of a song that steals parts from Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kieji's 4th suite) is the best Christmas non-carol ever) so to do it with the Thunderbirds intro is awesomeness beyond compare.

I fully realise that all my credibility has now gone completely down the drain, but y'know, who wants credibility? I have better things!

Pieces Of Toast

This morning; woke up, did the whole wash face, brush teeth, make toast, read bible thing (yes I'm a heathen, I don't read my bible before I eat toast in the morning). Finished reading bible and picked up end of toast that remained. Turned out not the same piece of toast that I had put down earlier.

Realised that this entry would be so much funnier if had, as intended, written 'Finished reading bible, picked up end of toast that remained and took a bite' instead of current line.

Football playoffs

I'm going to the football tonight, to watch Ipswich Town play and beat West Ham which will guarantee us a place in the playoff finals at Cardiff. I'm not too confident in Ipswich's awesome 733t football skills, more in their legendary ability to get as far as possible before failing miserably so as to inflict as much punishment as possible on their fans. Yay for football.

Pens, loans, exercise and Banzai!

• Start using new pen
• Name check Paul
• Blog about PAA
• Sort out student loan for next year
• Look up lesson plan for "hats(?) up"... adapt for x-ian peer led?
• Google "Psalty" songbook
• Google person who collects beer mats
• Sort out AGM Stuff
• Exercise right to vote - EXERCISE joke!!
• Andrew Marr uses Uniball pens!!!!
• RSVP to various weddings
• "I'm going to create a university in Manchester Newport called the Zoological Animal Institute. Then everyone could get arts degrees from it it! BANZAI!" - "Maybe write how unfunny this is"
• Return Dr. Who Tape

Introducing my PAA

So I've been using this wonderful device called a paa (personal analog assitant) ¹ to organise my life for the last month or so and it's working fantastically. On it I'll scribble down things that I need to do or stuff that I think up or quite frequently ideas I want to write about. Generally the need to do stuff makes sense when I read it again a while later but items that fall into the other two categories frequently either fail to make sense or are greeted with the reaction 'how on earth is that funny?'. That's if I can read them again. Anyway, I was thinking the other day that on there own the little bullet points aren't that amusing or site worthy, but together they're freakin' awesome! That's right people, more updates containing lots of little things that aren't funny!

Footnotes

1: Some of the cool kids are calling it a hipster pda but I'm just not that cool enough.

EMI and the great piracy fun

As part of my hip young gunslinging lifestyle that I frequently fail to mention I'm an Oxford Brookes student, which among other things means that I get weekly e-mails from Oxford Brookes telling me things like "COMMERCIAL PLACEMENT OPPORTUNITY WITH BIG COMPANY FOR GRADUATES!","EARN £60 QUID A DAY BEING POKED BY NEEDLES!","NEW BUS TIMETABLES!". It's well educated spam delivered as regular as clockwork from the good administrators of Oxford Brookes. Whatever though, it's the first of these types of e-mails that concerns me now.

"2nd EMI Commercial Placement - CONTENT PROTECTION": This is both an exciting and incredibly challenging time for our Content Protection team who are working on a variety of initiatives to overcome and combat the problems associated with music downloading. Briefly, this includes: The development of solutions to deliver all music to relevant parties in a ‘protective’ and ‘effective’ manner. Yadda yadda yadda write reports on how people downloading music are evil yadda yadda. Why is this of any concern? Because under the job description later on it has the following bullet points:

3 eBay:

1. Trawling (on a daily and weekly basis)
2. Composing of notice
3. Saving screen shots
4. Inputting details into Black List
5. Sending follow up emails and letters
6. Dealing with eBay on all issues
7. Sending Blacklist to promo departments on a monthly basis

Don't you wish you could be an Oxford Brookes Graduate so that you too could get a placement with EMI and spend a few hours a day trawling eBay for people selling on promotional CDs? And then e-mailing the promo department telling them who's being naughty and shouldn't be given promo CDs? Awesome job! How to clamp down on music piracy; the grasping at straws method.

CCTV saves the day

Since seeing this on the side of a Suffolk County Council Building, I feel safer already. Seriously, this is what your tax paying gets you in this part of the country.

Friday The 6th

• I got Nu-Clear Sounds by Ash, Strange Weather Lately by Astrid, he Best Of Aerosmith by Aerosmith (duh) and The Joshua Tree by U2 all from a charity shop for the grand total of £9 the other day. Hooray for charity shops!
• Everyone should go download the new and final Kinesis single off You Are Being Lied To. Because I say so.
• On Monday I will spend all day making fires with sticks, putting them out and making fires again.
• Today in 1856 Sigmund Freud was born to his mother. There are so many jokes in that one sentence that I'm not even going to start.

Topical Points

• Yesterday I recieved Tiger in the mail four days late, understandably it was rather hungry. Good thing I showed an uncharacteristic lack of concern for the health and well-being of the delivery person.
• Today I exercised my democratic right to vote, which is good because it hasn't been out in a while and it's getting rather fat. Stop eating so many pies democratic right to vote!
• Tomorrow I plan on making even more witty jokes about topical issues, bring on the Saint Justus jokes!

A whole week! How did you cope?

I Mentioned It Once

As part of my work (which we actively don't mention on this website now, as opposed to the previous passive "why would you want to hear about what I did today?" stance on it) I got to go on BBC Radio Suffolk to talk about something we were doing (I do realise that in the space of one sentence I've just set-up a rule for myself and broken it, but I figure speaking about what I said on BBC Radio Suffolk is alright because, you know, they were broadcasting what I said about my work across the entire county and Internet). Afterwards various people who happened to be up at 8:30 in the morning listening to BBC Radio Suffolk commented on it. Generally it was well received but one rather salient point was made; given the demographics of BBC Radio Suffolk at 8:30 on a Sunday morning I should have probably avoided the repeated use of the expression 'blitz the area' to describe what we were going to do.

Updates

An entire week! How did anyone cope? Things are slightly different around here, mostly underneath the surface but some things should be more evident. The second entry on the front page will now always be the last four photos I've stuck on flickr, at the moment the entry box they are in probably looks too much like a regular entry box so any ideas how to subtly distinguish it from the other regular entries would be greatly appreciated.

The random boxes / labels / bombs / stars that act as navigation hinderances are now completely randomised and will take you to a category almost at random when you click on them. Also on the individual archive pages the comments now have a very extended disclaimer, however this'll only be visible if you don't click 'remember me' in the comments field. The reason for these caveats will be explained in more detail later this week.

On a slight tangeant, I'm very excited we're now in May as I can unleash my whole arsenal of May related jokes on people. "May the second..." "May the second what?".

An entire week! How did anyone cope?