Archive for the ‘Funny and Cool’ Category

I’ve walked past this sign several times but the other day a thought popped into my head “How do you check the gender of a sunbed?”.  Enquiring minds need to know.

Pick any one of Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman or John Malkovich and you’d have my attention for RED.

Brian Cox or Ernest Borgnine would push this into my want to see list.

Helen Mirren flower arranging is a bit a bit Calendar Girls. Helen Mirren with a machine gun? Helen Mirren with a Machine Gun! Ok I’m buying this. Heading into not just the danger zone but Hot Fuzz territory.  I don’t care about the reviews.

Then they ice a rather fruit looking cake with Mary-Louise Parker who was both funny and smart in the West Wing.  Tasty.

Looks like REDs at least one must see film in October.

This sign is on the boards which cover the ground floor of an empty building a short distance from where I work. Whenever I walk past it amuse me in the same way that a sign on the side entrance to Wollaton Park in Nottingham amused me in my youth. It read simply “Escaping Dear Please Close the Gate”.

I’ve added entries for Dark Conspiracy, Twilight 2000 and Babylon 5 to the Open the Door page.

Wellington's Column Liverpool

Every work day I pass Wellington’s Column (or the Waterloo Memorial) on the corner of William Brown Street and Lime Street in Liverpool.

I think I may have spent too much time at work using Google Analytics and playing with numbers this week…

The following fact has absolutely no practical value I can think of…

On the first five days of March a seagull was stood on Wellington’s head four days out of five when I went past in the morning.

1. Greatest Sickly Love Songs
2. The One with Pink Roses on the Cover
3. Twelve Songs You’d Forgotten and One You Still Sing in the Bath
4. Last Years Valentines Album with a Different Cover on It
5. Songs that Say I Hate You More than Words Ever Could (Double CD with Sleeve Notes)
6. Some Random Album I Grabbed in a Hurry because I was Running Late for the Train
7. Cheesy, Big Perm, 80s, Rock Love Songs (Including Genuine Lock of Rock Star Hair*)
8. Songs Inspired by Roger Corman’s The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
9. Last Years Halloween Album in the Wrong Box
10. The One Next to the Charcoal Brickets because Flowers are Sold Out at the Petrol Station
11. Twelve Songs You’d Forgotten and One You Hum (Badly) in the Bath because you’ve Forgotten all the Words Volume 2

* Artificial or animal hair may be substituted. Limit of one hair per album. Certificate of Authenticity available on Request.  Leaving the hair at a murder scene to frame a random 80s rock star may result in prosecution.

I had a slightly odd experience shopping on New Years Eve 1999.  I was visiting some friends for a new years party and needed supplies so I nipped round to the local superstore, at the time it was a Co-Op.  It was pretty late in the day and the first thing I remember was that the car park was really empty.  The store was the same.  There were more staff than customers.  Just going round ahead of me were a couple of groups of customers who have stuck in my mind ever since.

The first group of customers was a group of five nurses who must have come straight from work as they were all in uniform.  From their (loud) conversation it was clear they shared a house and were getting supplies in for a party.  They had a three trolleys and a system.  Trolley one was for regular food.  Trolley two was for snacks and party food.  Trolley three was for drink.

The second group of customers were a pair of male students who each had a trolley.  From their equally loud conversation it was pretty clear they’d been partying hard for a few days and they’d just realised they’d no food in the house and they’d heard something about all the world’s computers going wrong at midnight.  Someone had told them it was going to happen and it was going to be like a bad 1970s disaster movie.

A few things rapidly became apparent…

First the students started filling their trolleys.  They had a simple mantra.  They wanted it cheap.  They wanted it with a long use by date.  They wanted lots of it.  Since all the computers were going to fail though the cost of it wouldn’t really matter.  I watched them take six cardboard pallets each of canned potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, corned beef and tuna from the shelf as I went past them.

Meanwhile the nurses had decided that the priority was trolley three, then trolley two and then trolley one.  Trolley three had gained a twin trolley 3a.  Trolley 3 was for beer while trolley 3a was for wine and spirits.  Trolley one gained some mixers, soft drinks and a variety of fruit juice for drinking when they had a hangover on new years day.  It also gained a few packs of aspirin and paracetamol.

I’d picked up some cheese that the price had been slashed on (I think it was brie) and needed some bread.  The bakery had three staff on it.  Two I’d seen on previous visits.  The other had to be their manager.  They wanted to leave early.  He said they couldn’t go till all the speciality bread they kept behind a counter in a cabinet was sold. There was one loaf left.  It had seeds on it.  Really special.  Special price (reduced to clear before the almost end of the millennial sell by date) £0.50.  They offered to buy it – he refused as staff can’t buy stuff on sale while working.  They offered to pay full price.  He wouldn’t have any of it.  I bought it.

Behind me some strife had broken out.  The nurses had a problem.  They needed a bottle opener and a cork screw.  They were buying everything else from a shared kitty but the implements would last – who would get to keep them?  These were there millenium cork screw.  What if them had a special visitor and wanted to have a bottle in private.  What would the others use to open a bottle.  Two cork screws should be acquired but only one bottle opener was needed.  I picked up something to drink and never heard the solution to the cork screw situation.

I had a choice of checkout.  Like the bread counter management was enforcing a no one leaves till it’s all sold policy.  Outside in the car park the students were emptying four trolley loads of canned goods; sacks of potatoes; loaves of the cheapest nastiest bread; tooth paste (civilization might have collapsed but they’d still have clean teeth) and other supplies into the boot of a beat up hatch back.  All they needed was a chain saw and a shotgun to complete their outfitting for the apocalypse.

I expect they felt that way in the months to come as they lived on their supplies and paid off credit card the bill for it all.

It was all slightly odd and I always ment to turn it into a story but I’ve never found the right angle to take on it.  One day I might.

Have a happy new year.

Allegedly.  I’ll come to that in a minute.

Most spam is annoying but once in a while the bots assemble two random concepts that make a slightly surreal or scary combination.  Once in a while those are so out there and look so like real messages that they make it past the spam filters.  Here’s one I got today (I’ve pixellated out the site’s info not because I don’t want to embarrass them but because I don’t want to give them any publicity) about my post about gobos the other day…

I’m not going to go into the rubbish about SEO other than to say if they’re link building this way how do I know they’re not doing all sorts of black hat SEO that’s going to get them blacklisted as a bad neighbourhood and do me more harm than good.

In this case the bot found some of my recipes and some of my stuff about gobos and decided that there was a chance that there was some sort of long tail search that it could optimize for.  Given the money being mentioned for some of that kind of automatically written content it’s no wonder that companies are trying to get in on the act.  This one though takes the biscuit.  Or as the American’s might say the cookie.  Cookies are made with Cookie Cutters which is a term sometimes confused with gobos although strictly speaking cookies and gobos are not the same thing which is why I think the bot may have made its blind leap of machine logic.

What I find funny is the idea that they would include gobos in a recipe database.  Gobos.  Pieces of glass that are etched or otherwise treated so as to project images or patters from lights.  I can’t help thinking they would be a little bit chewy and might cause some indigestion.  Not quite as funny as Monty Python’s Albatros or Crunchy frog but not too far away.

Anyway it amused me but I’ve not explained the Edible Underwear connection.

So what does any of this have to do with Edible Underwear?  Not a lot really other than something that happened when out drinking with some friends who do a bit acting.  They’d been eating the left over sugar glass props (bottles and some glasses used in a fight scene) from a play to see how one of the bar staff they knew would react.  One young lady who was normally quite prim and proper who had probably had a bit too much to drink said it tasted like edible underwear and promptly went a fetching shade that matched the beetroot red of the wine bottle she was nibbling on…

DanDiplo commented on Grand Theft Auto IV being 14.9GB installed on Twitter tonight and threw away the rhetorical question how long would the listing be in Your Sinclair. Unfortunately I had the back of an envelope and the Internet to hand…

Update: I spotted a couple of obvious mistake myself: Grand Theft Auto is 32 Bit not 8 Bit so each Byte will need 8 characters to represent it in the magazine rather than 2 and Your Sinclair was less than 5mm thick. This is the corrected version of the envelope.

1 Page for the loader in Basic (but as will soon become apparent that’s not significant)

1 page of Your Sinclair listing in 3 columns of 85 lines each including 16 characters representing 8 bytes = 2040 Bytes / page but Grand Theft Auto IV is 32 Bit so it takes 8 characters to represent a Byte so that means only 510 Bytes / page!

1 magazine of 100 pages = 51000Bytes or 50KB

So 14.2GB is around 2.4 million issues of Your Sinclair

Now adding in line number and check sum extras 1 page is 3 x 85 x 25 characters = 6375 key strokes

A 70 Word Per Minute Typist enters 350 characters each minute = 1800 minutes or 30 hours to type in an issue

So my back of the envelope calculation is that it would take 3000000 days to enter all the code or 8200 years if Grand Theft Auto IV had been listed in Your Spectrum.

From memory an issue was about 3mm thick so if you stacked them one on top of another they’d form a pile 7.2 km high or slightly less than 19 Empire State buildings (with the aerial) stacked on top of each other.

Anyone spot any more mistakes?

I’ve posted an updated excerpt from an article I wrote for Valkyrie Magazine issue 25: Open the Door on how characters go through doors in different games.