Radio Rant...

Today I have been subjected to a full day of BBC Radio 2. Supposedly people of my generation are the target audience, because frankly listening to Radio 1 is a bit like watching The Kardashians, soul destroying!
I had already developed a subtle loathing for Radio 2 due to it's insistence on overplaying songs such as 'Only Human' by somebody Perry (not Katy Perry)... the first time you hear it you think, oh that's not too bad (you know, compared all the other shit they play), the 'little girl' voice is a bit annoying, but then you realise the whole construct of the song is merely to facilitate the 'loud' chorus and it quickly starts to grate like knuckles on a cheese grater.
I don't mind Ken Bruce so much, he's a modern day Terry Wogan and bumbles along, but Steve Wright is just plain irritating. He really isn't nearly as funny as he thinks he is and his pointless interjections into everything and his 'hilarious' singing on the end of every song is frankly painful. Still, incredible as it sounds, the other week I was positively missing him as some clown decided to enlist arch idiot Patrick Keilty to cover for Steve's holiday.
Jesus Christ, you cannot imagine the torment this man caused during his short tenure. His main shtick seems to be 'I'm shit, I know it and you know it, and if I make enough jokes about how shit I actually am, then maybe I can get away with this'. Oh that, and of course 'I'm Irish'. 'I drink Guinness because I'm Irish'. 'Did I mention that I'm Irish, did I'. 'So I did, but I am you know, proper Irish I am'. And so on and so forth...
I imagine all of Patrick's friends call him 'Paddy' when they are in the pub drinking, but really it would be a whole lot more constructive and appropriate to call him 'That wanker off the radio' like everyone else does.
Not all of my ire is a direct fault of the British Broadcasting Corporation, for example today I was momentarily cheered by the first few notes of Meat Loaf's seminal classic 'Bat Out of Hell', only to realise in very short order that they were playing some sort of bullshit edited version which missed out the whole intro and probably several other parts too. It's not overstating the case to say that I was incensed! I realise of course that the BBC themselves are not responsible for the existence of an edited version of the sing, it could well be that it was the 'single' version as released by the record label at the time. But even if it was, that is no reason to chose to play that abomination when the album version is freely and readily available. Could it be that there are people out there who think that's how 'Bat Out of Hell' should actually sound? Oh. My. God. No! It's like framing the Mona Lisa so that the top of her head is off the top of the frame, you just wouldn't, would you?
And another thing, what is it with the fucking clown drum all of a sudden? Fucking Mumford and Sons have introduced a new sound which we shall for the purposes of classification which makes sense to no one but myself call 'Punk Wurzels', although it sounds nothing like as interesting as that description probably suggests... and now their comedy drum sound (now to be known as 'Clown Drums') is appearing in other bands songs. Radio 2 played a Boyzone song today with it in, fucking Boyzone! Jump on that Punk Wurzels bandwagon boys, and why don't you throw in a snatch of Dubstep while you're at it? Go on, I dare you.
But Patrick Keilty, thank fuck he was only a temporary measure!

Like shooting fish in a barrel...

The Kardashians... or more precisely, Kim Kardashian, or more precisily still, the press's obsession with her arse. Well, yes, it's big. Unfeasibly big. When you see her side on it actually looks like it's lagging behind her... which is neither normal or particularly attractive. I mean I would consider myself an ass man for sure, but that is too much ass! I was in a supermarket this morning and there was a magazine by the tills which had a photo of Kim on the front with the line 'How Kim got her NEW Bum!'.
Usually when you see that kind of headline, it's usually accompanying a photo of a previously 'overweight' (couple of pounds probably...) celebrity showing off their tight little ass. This picture basically looks like Kim has had a photo of her ass taken in a hall of mirrors, I mean it's fucking hilarious. And the fact that it says her 'new' bum... kinda gives the game away that it's not 100% natural, doesn't it?
So what is the secret of her comedy butt? I'm not sufficiently interested to buy the magazine to find out, but I'm guessing somewhere along the line it involves blowing up a couple of balloons and inserting them into her trousers. What else could it be? I mean if she's actually injected something into her ass to make it that big, then... how will she ever be able to lie on her back again?
To be honest, I'm not a fan of the Kardashians, I don't honestly think she's all that stunningly beautiful... she wears far too much make up for a start. I have seen a couple of episodes of their show (how embarrassing) and it's possibly the lamest, dullest, most boring twenty two minutes I've ever spent. The only saving grace was the douchebag boyfriend with the cane who was such a monumental prick it was mildly amusing to watch him make an absolute arse of himself as he hunted for his 'cane'... Oh my life, make it stop.
Apparently, and I'm sure this will be useful information for all those who haven't read a paper today, Mr Kanye West was hoping to have his bestest bud 'Jay-Z' as his best man at his forthcoming wedding to Kim, only problem is... Jaz-Z's missus 'Beyonce' don't want nothing to do with it because she doesn't want to appear on a trashy TV show. Which means she has automatically gone up in my estimation... I wouldn't want to appear on that trashy TV show either, especially if I had an actual talent (unlike Kim for example) and didn't need the exposure.
Anyway, I think I see the end in sight... surely the wedding is the natural end of the show. But wait, she's already got married once.... well, faked it more like, but her dumb fucking fans still buy into it. And wait, actually that's not her house in the TV show, well never mind... at this point nothing would really surprise me, not even pulling a couple of balloons out of her trousers.

More on alarm clocks...

As you may remember (if you've got a really astonishingly good memory for banal shit) I posted about alarm clocks about a year ago, and I'm pleased to report that I finally found a replacement for my alarm clock on eBay. In the meantime I bought another alarm clock which was visible in daylight but also had a light for the nighttime (which, you will of course remember I really don't need because I have the time projected on the ceiling by the old alarm clock....). The thing that pissed me off about this one is that every button you press on this piece of crap makes a beep. Why the fuck would anybody want that? 

I want to turn the alarm off before it goes off so that I don't wake my wife  - BEEP!

I want to see the time in the dark in the middle of the night - BEEP!

I need to turn the alarm on late at night and my wife is already asleep - BEEP!

I need to change the alarm time late at night and my wife is already asleep - A beep for every fucking minute!!!

Thankfully, as I said, I've now found a replacement for my original one so this thing was consigned to the great alarm clock cloud in the sky, but for several months it really pissed me off!

The Fighting Temeraire...

On my trip to London yesterday I saw this painting in the National Gallery and was frankly astonished to read that it had been voted the best painting in England. Frankly it wasn't even the best painting in that room as far as I was concerned and this Holbein was in the same gallery and is so much better.

I guess this isn't really a rant so much as just a declaration of incredulity at how plain wrong so many people can be!!!

Alarm clocks (why is everything so shit part 973).

After the saga of the kettle, now it's alarm clocks that are pissing me off.
We've had a projecting alarm clock for about ten years now, which means the time is always visible on the ceiling all through the night. It's brilliant, but the lead broke yesterday and the projection only works when it's connected to the mains. So the obvious thing is to go buy a new one.
Except that's not as easy as it sounds and the ones we could find looked a bit shit.
So I managed to modify the clock to accept a generic lead but for reasons that are too boring to go into I needed to get a new simple, cheap alarm clock to use just for the alarm, leaving that clock to do just the projecting.
So the first one I bought was a really simple, dirt cheap clock with a simple on/off button on the top. Perfect. Except that it ticks really fucking loudly. Who the fuck wants a ticking bedside clock?
So I took that back and got a digital one, smart move I thought.
Wrong.
This one comes with a blue label over the display showing black letters on a blue background. Slightly strange but okay.... what this actually indicates is that when you press the snooze button the blue light comes on and you can see the time. Except you don't need to because when it's dark the the numbers are really bright, in a kind of phosphorescent way.... and in our particular case I don't need to see the numbers at night cos my other clock is projecting the time on the ceiling.
What I actually need, is a clock I can read when it's light and I'm gauging how many more minutes I can stay in bed before I really have to get up (cos when it's light you can't see the numbers on the ceiling).
The thing is, when it's light the display looks black and that's when you have to press the button to light up the display. I mean what the fuck is the point of that exactly? Who wants a fucking clock you need to light up in the day to see? I really do wonder who signed this piece of shit off, I really do.

Card-meggedon...

It's Mother's Day next Sunday and I've just been to buy a card. So far, so good... I don't have a problem with that, my mum is okay, we're not super best buddies or anything but I don't have a problem with her or anything. What I do have a problem with is the fucking cards on display in the shop.
Firstly, I don't want a card with 'To Mummy' on it, nor one that's clearly supposed to come from a pain in the arse teenager. I also don't want one that eulogises endlessly about how wonderful my mother is, cos, like I said, she's okay, we get on and we have the same sense of humour but really, I'm a grown man, and I've been a pretty much perfect child. So I really don't have an awful lot to be grateful for, over and above the normal stuff. You know, giving birth, feeding me, clothing me, putting a roof over my head etc etc....
What I mean is, I haven't been any kind of drain on them for a good twenty years, I never trashed my mum's car, or got into massive debts and needed bailing out, etc etc....
Anyway, I'm getting off topic here. The point is the shops can only stock a finite number of cards and as I said, excluding the nauseating, eulogising cards and the ones that are clearly meant for people still living at home, that usually leaves me with a choice of one or two at best.
This unacceptable situation is only made worse by the ridiculous number of bullshit cards doing the rounds. I'm sure you've noticed this when you go to buy a birthday card, and indeed, I may have mentioned this before on this blog. Bullshit cards are cards that are so fucking specific as to be ridiculous. Time was if you had some kind of unorthodox relationship you got a non-specific card and you wrote in it. Then they developed the 'from both of us' card to help you out, so that divorced people in new relationships could send cards without offending anybody.
Over the years more and more bullshit cards have appeared, Happy Birthday from the dog / cat / rabbit / iguana / pterodactyl.... you get the picture. So today I wasn't particularly surprised to see Mother's Day cards for Nan and Grannie, even though it's rather missing the point. It's Mother's Day, so you send your mother a card and she sends her mother a card and (if her mother is still alive) she sends her mother a card. It's not down to you to send your mother's mother a card, or your mother's mother's mother a card. It's fucking Mothers Day, not Nannies Day or Grannies Day for fucks sake.
But today, I saw a card which pushed me to the brink of sanity, a card so fucking ridiculous that I almost grabbed it right off the shelf, ripped it into tiny pieces and pissed on it, right there in the store. Happy Mother's Day to the Mother to Be!
The fucking Mother to Be!
What the fuck is that?
Plenty of time for this shit when she's a mother, not before. And when pray, is it acceptable to send this fucking card? When the baby's due at any time? When the baby's kicking? When the baby's first diagnosed (yes, diagnosed... it's a disease that will make you tired, poor, irritable, uncomfortable, and could even kill you). Perhaps when you're just trying for a baby? God this makes me angry. Perhaps it would be a good card to send a woman you're hoping to get lucky with, kind of a statement of intent?
No this card is bullshit of the worst kind, and how are you going to sign it? From the foetus?
And what if the baby miscarries? Is this bullshit card going to be clung to like some bullshit message from beyond the grave?
No, I think it would be best all round if these cards were boycotted altogether, because somewhere some poor bastard is going to get it in the neck come next Sunday because his wife has a tiny bump and her didn't get her a fucking stupid 'Mum-to-be' card. The poor schmuck didn't realise he had to start that until the baby was actually born, the ill advised buffoon.

Nestle, just leave it alone!

Once upon a time there was a Kit Kit, it wasn't anyone's favourite biscuit, but it was better than a Penguin, a Breakaway or (God help us) a Viscount (minty but kind of soft as if it was out of date). Back in the day Kit Kat came in two styles, four finger and two finger (though why anyone would buy a two finger Kit Kat is beyond me).
In relatively recent years, probably since good old Rowntree was bought out by the evil Nestle corporation, Kit Kat as expanded as a brand, with mixed results. On the one hand, a positive development was the invention of the Chunky Kit Kat, which was in every way superior to the original, while still being only moderately exciting.
Spurred on by the success of this bigger, chunkier biscuit, Nestle started fucking around, there was a white chocolate version (one which periodically reappears and disappears, it's rank) an orange version (very short lived but rather tasty, resurrected in the two finger format with very limited success) and of course the almost inedible King Size. King Size anything is good, but the King Size Kit Kat was just too big, even for a chocoholics like me.
In even more recent years we had the Caramel Kit Kat. Finally here was a Kit Kat we could believe in, the caramel lifted the product to heights no Kit Kat had ever dreamed of, never mind attained. And it's not hard to see why, caramel is the X-factor which lifts all chocolate to a higher level and makes it desirable.
Except Twix of course, Twix is shit. How anyone can combine biscuit, caramel and chocolate and come up with something as tedious as Twix is beyond me.
Anyway, so far so good. We have the Chunky Kit Kat for emergencies, the old two/four finger style Kit Kat for the old school Kit Kat eaters and the Caramel for the cognoscenti. Then they started making special editions with nuts in, trying to manufacture a Kit Kat/Snicker hybrid (why anyone thought was a good idea I don't know...) and then came the big competition. Four new flavours were produced, but there could be only one winner.
The winner was peanut butter, which I thought might be nice until I tried it. But what really sucked was that the peanut butter REPLACED the Caramel Kit Kat. What madness was this?
I mean fuck you Nestle, fuck you in your stupid ass.
Now there's a new breed of Kit Kat's, including Fudge, Mint and some others, all of which won't be as good as the Caramel one. I suppose the fudge one might be okay, but then if it is the bastards will only discontinue it. It's like all those poor saps who sat through the first two series of Lost on terrestrial TV only for it to be transferred to Sky. So I say fuck you Nestle, I won't even try another Kit Kat until you bring back the caramel one.