fudge it

i did it. i did the nosy granny neighbour routine and told the neighbours to 'put that fire out, pleeeeeease!' (yes, there was a little voice in my head saying 'you wimp. you said please.'). well. you try taking off the entire wardrobe for the nieces off the washing line at light speed.

great. now i have anger again.

me: call your mum. someone's put a fire on...
niece #1: have they made somebody dead?

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J: They're discussing red wine. Somebody says American wines are nice. Philistines.
me: I know. I mean, what is wrong with coca-cola?

this isn't even that funny, i know. but you wanna know what i got for like, fifty quid yesterday? you're going to have to wait for a picture. the ones i've seen online make it look obsolete. but it's far from obsolete. oh what the hell. here it is.

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on my way to catch the bus to the station, for the coach to bradford on saturday, i saw what i thought was a photo stuck to the bus shelter. when i looked closer i realised it was a postcard. of four mummies hanging from a wall. so i pull it off the bus shelter, and on the back it says the name of the picture is 'at the bus stop.' ha ha.

the picture was taken at the capuchin catacombs, and i've made the mistake i've looking it up before 9am. so instead of going into further details this site, dressed for eternity by paolo ventura, will tell you all you need to know. and there are pictures too. enter at your own risk, innit.

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i've done nothing all morning. nowt. nada. zip. zilch. and after closing the window on yet another blog that fails to keep my attention for more than 5 seconds, my first thought was 'yep. i'm ready to die now.' have caught up on my links, and decided maybe i should trawl for more blogs to add. but there's not much out there, i tell you. i want something that makes for good reading, like some of the emails i get from J (no, this isn't me insisting you update your dead(?) blog, again.) and the blogs i link to, i check their links out too, in case you were wondering.

wait. who reads this blog? haven't you got a blog? can i see it? tell me tell me tell me.

second thought: 'just what on earth are you talking about?'

i'm trying to consume as much coffee as possible without looking like the pakistani who exploits the free drinks at work. 2 hour meeting this afternoon innit. thank god they're only once a month. zzz. coffee tasted like plastic, all the more chemicals for me innit. and yes, i have noticed a bit of an innit overkill on the blog. oh, shut up!!

you know those hypnotherapy trigger words? like the word 'rosebud' in that episode of columbo once, it made the murderers's dogs go kill someone or something like that i think. anyway, you know what my trigger words would be? 'atkins diet.' shut up about the atkins diet. anyone would think you were talking about push pops, or the new single by dido or something. and they might as well act as trigger words too. pow.

coffee. sleep. someone even recommended nicotine.

expect normal service to resume next week. whatever that is.

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somebody stop me. or maybe that should be, try and stop me.

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when i lived in bradford, my aunt told me about living up north. "some of the areas round 'ere, they're beeyoo'iful. but you wouldn't last that very long, people drive you out of there in no time."

a good example of what she meant is a comment made by a woman on this story: Just an average day in Average Town:

According to the latest census, Aireborough in West Yorkshire is the most "average" place in England and Wales. With so many aspects of their lives matching national averages, the locals might even be thought of as extraordinarily... ordinary.

..."The best thing about living here is that everyone's white," says one woman [the actual figure is 96.45%]. "In Bradford, it's all Asian and they make the place dirty."
Do you know any non-white people, personally? "Well, no. Not around here."

what do you say to that? the asian people in bradford have standards too, and they're anything but ordinary.

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er, please give generously?

Doctor slang is a dying art: The inventive language created by doctors the world over to insult their patients - or each other - is in danger of becoming extinct.

Top medical acronyms:

CTD - Circling the Drain (A patient expected to die soon)
GLM - Good looking Mum
GPO - Good for Parts Only
TEETH - Tried Everything Else, Try Homeopathy
UBI - Unexplained Beer Injury


circling the drain, that's my favourite.

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yes, sir

this is a post about nothing. except that if you're going to scatter lawn feed/moss and weed killer over a garden that's a 150ft long, be sure to wear a mask. or you too can sound like the teacher in charlie brown. [brother #2 smokes, so it didn't make that much of a difference to him.]

Q. Where can I get the voice of Charlie Brown's teacher?

A. While it's not a sound available for easy distribution, it was created for the specials on a trombone, with the use of a plunger as a mute.
[via here]

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monday monday monday. yesterday we had a visit by some people from bradford, sister-in-law #1 can't stand their mother because she's like hyacinth bucket, and she had to cook all this food for her. anyway the last time they were here another family arrived not long after. these two families are only bitter rivals innit. they're not on speaking terms after a marriage deal went horribly wrong or something. anyway, on that visit hyacinth made a hasty exit. yesterday, hyacinth had been around for about 3 hours when, you guessed it, that family arrive again. fortunately for us we have two living rooms. unfortunate for the parents that they had to run from one room to another for the next hour or so. family #2 eventually got the picture and fled.

other news: niece #1 decided on pretending it was her birthday and made £90 in birthday money. whoa.

foolproof and incapable of error. brian, innit.

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random fact of the day at random is good:

Spending more than 20 minutes on public transport everyday will take 10 years off your lifespan

oh. my. god.

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the appletiser advert music. so many people want it. (you know who you are, i have ways). i read somewhere it's similar to a track on the amelie soundtrack. the only sample audio file i can find is for track 3, La Valse D'Amelie, and it does sorta sound like it. there are different versions on the soundtrack, so er, i dunno, keep looking. but when you do find it, lemme know, innit!

funny that. a lot of people want to know what music is being played on tv adverts these days (brian should know). there's this site, answerbank, yadda yadda. i saw an advert recently where there was a teeny tiny title telling you what music was playing, but it was that boring i can't remember it. now am-scray.

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you've got more mail

J: My life has to change. Dramatically.
Me: Just don't take the 'I wonder what it feels like to kill a person' line, will you?

gah. email addiction. time for me to take a holiday, i think. even if it is for kids.

so i'm getting all occupied over sister #4's a-level results, we were texting and calling each other during the morning (me: "call the uni now!" her: "yeah, yeah i know, oh wait i just saw my mate, hey bitch!!" call ends). anyway too distracted to realise someone was asking me to join them for lunch so i'm all 'yes, yes' and when i calm down i realise what i've done. argh. how'd it go?

someone #1: organisational policies...ratification...
someone #2: ...weltanschaung...tesco...
me: oh wow look! that factory is on fire!

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i'm sitting at the kitchen table, obviously on the pc. the dad is hovering. 'this is what you do with your free time?' by that he doesn't mean blogging, he means staring at the screen. 'yep.'

five minutes later he's still hovering. tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. it's going to happen any second now. the meaning of life chat.

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feedback, not fan mail, i like to think.

I meant to say. Fudgeit looks lovely. Those colours and stripes, they're lovely. I could kinda somehow feel my eyes reacting to it; it was a kinda uplifting feeling. Very good.

thanks. i took the little tiles and pictures off because:

a) you buy webspace. if you previously used blogspot, you can go a bit delirious at the words 'image hosting.' but the pictures on weblog frenzy is over, i'm past that now. plus:
b) it took forever for the blog to load. ages and ages. so back to this header. for now.

whaddaya think? stripes, pictures, tiles, or what? nothing at all maybe? today i actually sat at my desk thinking: 'what are you doing with a weblog?!'

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my first link to a photoblog: Hear See NYC. the difference is brian's camera (no not this brian, another brian) records a sound clip as well, so you can hear what was going on when the picture was taken. some of the pictures will have a sound clip, some won't. but go see. and hear.

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hmm. The Album Chart: what you should be paying. not that i've read all of it, but the first album mentioned happens to be...

12:20 pm. finished reading it. i'm going to go for my lunch break. sit out in the sunshine by the canal and its greeeeen water. plug in my walkman. before i hit play i'm going to set the volume to the highest setting. that should wake me up. i think my head is going to be so messed up this week. yesterday i kept feeling like the world was going to end. today i'm feeling all control freaky and optimistic. maybe i should bring the imood icon back. yeah. i might just do that.

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'the parents' have gone oop north for a couple of days. for brothers #1 - 3 it's like christmas. meaning the nintendo gamecube is going to live in the er, living room until they get back. legend of zelda/windwaker/whatever looks all right, but how can anyone be bothered to complete an adventure game? you don't wanna do that, you want one of these. or forget that. that's too nice a gadget. right now i can hear gunfire, it's coming from the living room. 007 nightfire. lemme go see what they're using.

ok. it's a machine gun. very nice, something i could have done with last night. after a very very long day at the seaside (with brother #1, nieces #1, 2 and 3 plus a cousin aged 6), cheddar gorge, followed by a long drive through bristol, playing in an adventure park at a service station at 10pm, i finally got to sleep at about midnight (up since 6am). only for various drunk dimwits to walk past every hour or so, yelling, singing their heads off (a la pop idol), or walking in the middle of the road to stop whatever traffic came their way (i really need to learn to drive). even a catapult would have been fine. this sunday morning, the city would have woken up to the news that quite a few rough looking people were mysteriously found lying unconscious on a street i happened to live on. i suppose i could have borrowed the neighbours jetwash thingy for their driveway and blasted them with that. you get the picture anyway.

it was a very nice day at the seaside/cheddar gorge/bristol/adventure park at the service station though. every time i've read a paper lately there's people complaining about how holidays and stuff are complete chaos, and by the time it's over everyone seems to want to rip each other's heads off (oh please, we do that everyday, who needs a holiday to go crazy?). miminal sand damage, no kids falling over and bawling their eyes out. ok i admit i could have killed niece #1 for nicking my coffee, but no problem, just go buy another one. i'm really trying to rack my brains here for the biggest drama that happened yesterday. oh yes, niece #3 refused to go into the sea, and couldn't bear to walk on the sand. every time she did, she kept muttering to herself, 'dirty feet, dirty feet.'

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i meant to blog this link ages ago, seeing as the honda 'cog' advert did soooo much for my blog. adnan blogged about the honda ad a couple of weeks ago, and to make up for being so behind on things he put a link to a parody of the ad. so here you go. it's those two 118 118 men doing the honda ad.

friday!

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so, how's the new job?

K: ...you'll just have to make the most of it. The 1st month of a new job is the settling in period and you are nearly 2 weeks into that...so that means 2 weeks to go.....2 weeks more than you were into it, 2 weeks ago!!

in its own weird way, it makes sense.

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ver-ree fun-nee

me: so what are you going to do about those 70 cartons of 'pure guava juice' you've left in the garage?
brother #2: dad said they found a goatherd for you. we'll save them for your wedding.

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heatwave

late yesterday evening i spent half an hour looking for my keys, then half an hour looking for my wallet. heat does that to my memory. who am i kidding. i do that to my memory. anyway. in the living room. brother #4 is sitting at the window, the tv has been turned round so he can watch bill murray dressed up as a clown (film: quick change). he has one arm hanging out of the front window with a cigarette in his hand. no wallet. so i decide to check brother #1's car. no luck. but i did spot brother #4's arm hanging out of the window...

so i sneak up to the window, grab his arm and say in a sinister voice: 'tailypo, tailypo, have you seen my tailypo?' of course before i finished my sentence brother #4's arm was somewhere in the middle of the living room. very very funny. i laughed, giggled and stumbled my way up the stairs to my room, and sister-in-law #1, sister #5 and the mother look at me like i've gone mad.

i found my wallet in one of the mother's glass fruit bowls in the cupboard with her pyrex collection.

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my very first crazy google search result. yep, i made it to number 4 when it comes to searching for 'prank calls your dog bit me.'

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things.

the way to diffuse bitching between brother #4 and sister #5 is to yell: "oi! shut the hell up!" if that fails, then go back to what you were doing. in my case, playing with the natty little digital still camera you got for your leaving present. ve-ry nice. so instead of texting people about strange stuff i see, i'll be emailing pictures instead. maybe blogging them. i dunno.

i have a picture of my mother carrying a bucket. she's become very mean y'know. and by that i mean cheap. today i was going to buy a bag of ice, 100 (sort-of) cubes for £1. 'but's thats 100 rupees!' she exclaimed. i'm sure it'll pass, there's no way she can hold out on greek yogurt from marks innit.

oh about the job. i emailed karen and jonathan about it, and karen rightly pointed out there's 'No sky larking like round here though, so you had better get your serious head on.' enough said. when i really really like it, i'll let you know.

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mum is annoyed with our provisional name for nephew #4. while he was in hospital, one of the nurses said he'd always be george to her. and it stuck. so all you ever hear is 'where's george?' or 'have you seen george yet?'

me: so have you thought of any names then?
brother #2: genghis khan.
me: haha. no seriously.
brother #2: seriously? wolverine.

sister #2 is also here with niece #2. and nephews #1 and 2. and mother-in-law. and sister-in-law. and her husband. crazee!

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