Because I'm not in the mood for writing words today, we will have some pictures from my private collection. Here are some pictures I took last year. I try not to leave the house, so I take pictures with my browser. Here was the front page of the guardian on a sunday in october that got me very excited:



Wow! Frank Kermode's Scariest Movies! That's gonna be good!



Oh. Only Mark Kermode. Never mind then.

Warning: contents of this post should be of interest to approximately one other person on the planet.

I was re-viewing the classic Dr Who episode, Remembrance of the Daleks (which I found reassuring, since there were several carefully crafted references that I simply didn't get), and one thing stuck out at me. One of the minor characters spends the whole wearing a scarf that looks oddly familiar. Here's a picture:



Some careful researching (OK, very little, thanks to the efforts of Robin Walker [yes -- he of UK cable modem guide fame), it is easily identified on this chart as the official scarf of Girton College, Cambridge. Which I think makes some sense, since the story was set in 1963, when Girton was one of the few female Cambridge Colleges.

This is of absolutely no bearing on anything whatsoever.

Except, perhaps, to point out that Dr. Who appears to exhibit a strong Cambridge bias, especially because of the Douglas Adams connections. Anyone care to disagree? Thought not.

Talking of which, I recently received a package through the post, which included the instructions "Pull tab to open". And I thought to myself, "blimey, that was difficult enough when I was there...".

Right, quick for a quick blogstyle rant of "10 Things that are wrong with my local supermarket". Feel free to skip this one.

1. People standing outside asking me to donate money to causes that I think should actively be stopped.

2. Shrink wrapped fruit and veg in quantities greater than I want to use. And apples so shiny they must have been polished.

3. Never seeming to have the size and type of milk that I want, thus forcing me either to compromise or go to another shop on the way home.

4. Not selling any alcohol, thus enforcing a trip to the drug store that does sell alcohol. This is also related to the fact that my credit card sent me an annual statement with all the different purchases carefully separated out into different headings. Because I buy booze and food from different shops, this allows me to work out quite how much I spent on getting drunk over the last year, and it's a lot.

5. Putting special "half price offers" on things that I want to buy. This is because they completely sell out of the thing that I was prepared to pay full price for, and so I can't buy them at all.

6. Not selling the range of instant meals available in Britain for 99p or 5 for 4 quid. Instead I have to pay $4 for crappy instant lasagne. They have no instant curries! And the crisps are rubbish (but improving).

7. Having a policy of trying to get 20 items per minute swiped at the checkout. Thus, they end up throwing my food down the conveyor as fast as possible, and it doesn't get done any quicker because you need an extra five minutes at the end to sort out the mess that they've made.

8. Employing some idiot to stand at the end of the checkout and shovel my stuff into plastic bags without asking me. This is bad because : I brought my own bag that is better to carry and less wasteful. I don't want you to put my shopping into thirteen bags when I can fit it easily into one rucksack. When you pack my shopping, you seem to delight in putting the softest stuff at the bottom. I feel really awkward when someone else packs up my shopping, but now you make me feel even more awkward when I have to ask someone *not* to pack up my shopping.

9. The crappy electronic payment system. I *know* how to use it, you don't have to tell me to press enter or worse still, lean over and press enter for me. It's just that I like to know how much money is being deducted from my account before I agree to the transaction. On several occasions I have been overcharged because something got swiped twice when you were in such a rush to get all my shopping done at 20 items per minute.

10. People standing asking me for money on the way out as well.

Subsequent to the person who came here with "Lampost Worrying", someone actually expended vital seconds of their life in emailing to tell me that "Tepid Lampost" is a googlewhack for this page. Which is somewhat odd, since when I ran the search, I found another site with it on. And anyway, lampost is a mis-spelling, it should be lamppost. I will insist to the end that my spelling it as 'lampost' is deliberate, like when you refer to hampsters and skellingtons. People who say "Dalmations", on the other hand, must die. Now.

On internet search engine related matters, thanks to my mud flats correspondent from flat as a pancake East Anglia for pointing out the increasingly odd ad-links in the box that shows up at the top of this page without me asking it to. As of the previous update, it was linking to Talking George Bush Doll and Talking Presidents. Before that, it was pointing people in the direction of George Bush and His Family Paper Dolls, which is a pretty radical claim if true. Of course, mentioning this here will probably do nothing but make this worse.

The Milkshake totaliser is currently standing at 916. Keep those idiotic milkshake related queries pouring in, folks, and we'll see if we can clear 1000 by the end of the month...

Some exciting news that adds further credence to those who claim that this is really a blog after all. I went to visit a well known internet technology company yesterday afternoon. I was going to tell you all about it, but when I got there I had to sign a very hefty NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement, for those not in the know; NTBCW [Not To Be Confused With] NWA). So comprehensive were the restrictions that I signed up to that I'm not even sure that I can even tell you that I signed an NDA without violating it.

So, for the sake of simplicity, let's suppose that this company specialises in helping people find particular pieces of information buried deep within the writings of top russian authors -- let's call them Gogol.com -- and they have branches opening around the world. Anyway, the New York office is not as full of cool stuff as the West Coast branch is supposed to be. They do have some pretty decorations, and lava-lamps on the corner of cubicle. And bean bags. I walked out of there with a free t-shirt, which puts me in an exclusive club with along with about a million other people.

Getting back I listened to an album by Bomb The Bass and was a little startled to hear the lyrics "Bug Powder Dust and Mugwump Jism". You probably have to be me for that to make any sense.

Emendation to yesterday's entry: for 'births, marriages and deaths', you may read "dropping sprogs, swapping snogs and popping clogs". And I think that's very clever.

The big news here in America today is of course that some partial nudity was shown on national television. This is all the fault of that young rapscallion, from 'N-S*n#y@c, "Justin Timberlake [tore] off part of Janet Jackson's costume, exposing her right breast". [Advance crap pun warning: you may wish to prepare yourself for a crap pun]. He appeared somewhat contrite afterwards, blaming the whole thing on a "wardrobe malfunction". [Crap pun imminent] Poor boy, he seemed so embarassed. [All together now...] I bet he felt a right tit.

No one seems to have mentioned that there was also an actual real streaker at the game. But they aren't famous, so they aren't important.

I should point out that I didn't actually watch any of this. Couldn't be bothered. Easier just to watch the Daily Show deconstruction of the events.

Answers to readers questions

As a further public service to people who are reaching here with well formed search queries that are insufficiently answered by the material that they find here, I will attempt to post material that would have answered the question. Does that make sense?

Firstly, many congratulations to the person who got here looking for "i believe in a thing called love" "george formby" -- you clearly have the right idea. I don't know what that idea is, but I can just about see it working: a nice ukelele cover version of "I believe in a thing called love" would go down well. But that's true of just about any song, really (hence the last five years of DeadRingers).

I believe in a thing called love
Just listen to the rhythm of my heart
There's a chance we could make it now
We'll be rocking 'til the sun goes down
I believe in a thing called love
Ooh! Mr Woo, what should I do?

As I mentioned before, there are several Darkness tribute acts floating around at the moment. At least one of these had a very good and clever name, but I can't remember what it was [oh yes, it was "The Daftness"]. There's also a EP out, called "Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Darkness".

Thanks also to the reader who got here using "Lampost worrying". Possibly they were in search of a googlewhack, but more likely they were searching for information on the urban equivalent of the countryside blight of sheep worrying (see also: Chris Morris and his "shop bothering").

For the person looking for significant events in beyonces life, I would have thought that the tried and trusted trinity of "briths, marriages and deaths" should cover it [sometimes also known as 'dropping sprogs and popping clogs' -- see Truss if you must].

To the searcher for "free spank bloggs", I don't know which is more worrying -- that you are looking for this, or that this page comes up first.

Lastly, who are david brents favourite comedians. Answer: I don't know. But, to Ricky Gervais, here's a tip: stop telling that twins anecdote. We've all heard it now, it was quite funny the first time, but you really should get a new story.

Hot news from Hollywood, and after the success of his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson is about to start on the followup, a five hour epic retelling of the Lord of the Flies. Watch in awe as an army of a hundred thousand rampaging teenage boys chase a cowering, hacking computer generated piggy over the vast countryside of the deserted island of new zealand. Quiver at the hyper realistic rendering as the conch shell comes alive and starts talking to the boys. Quake as... er, I can't think of anything else that happens in Lord of the Flies.

Then wait for other great films from the "... of the ... " series, including: Stig of the Dump, with ultra-realistic computer animated Stig; King of the Hill, with ultra-realistic animated Hank Hill; Battle of the Planets, with ultra-realistic animated Battles, between planets; and an entirely computer generated version of Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Purdu (eh?).

The stats are currently clocking over 880 hits with the keyword "milkshake". When it gets to 1000, I think I'll celebrate by having a... milkshake, or something.

Here's a news story that I almost missed: three apparently unrelated deaths on flights from Miami to Heathrow in one weekend. Coincidences happen, but that doesn't make them any the less intriguing when they do.

Amazon has started selling votes. No, hang on, that's wrong. They've started allowing people to donate to presidential candidates through their website. I'm rather disappointed in this. Not only am I unable to participate (because, according to some accompanying rubric, I don't fulfill the conditions necessary to donate), but they haven't extended the usual Amazon technology to the problem, so there are no 5 star ratings or recommendations ("People who bribed this candidate also bribed..."). Which is a shame, since I would have liked to see what the usual illiterate masses could come up with those standing:

George W Bush

Rating: * AngelFish49 from Urbana-Champaign, Illinois

I really enjoyed the first in the George Bush series, so I bought the sequel with high expectations. What a disappointment! It frequently malfunctions, rarely makes sense, and is generally quite patronising. Perhaps this is meant to be satire, but I don't get it. When I chose Bush, I was so close to picking Gore instead, but now that is out-of-print, and so I'm stuck with this piece of junk instead.

3 out of 17 people found this review useful

Rating: **** WhiteCollarRedNeck from Portland, Oregon

THIS PREZ ROX... FOGET WHAT OTHERS SAY I LUVE THE TAX CUTS FOR THE POOR MAN LIKE ME. THE WAR SCENES ARE REALLY EXITING!!!! FOUR MORE YEARS!!!!!!!!!

12,726,162 out of 16,236,413 people found this review useful

Howard Dean

Rating ** WiredHipster from Boston, Mass.

I was really please with myself for getting the HowardDean AutomatedPresident over the internet for only [$$$]. All my friends were really jealous. But last week, it seemed to break down and emit a weird screeching noise. I am returning it immediately, and I guess I'll have to settled for something a little less advanced.

Dennis Kucinich

Rating ***** CluelessInSeattle from Seattle, Washington.

Duz ne1 no whether this is ne gud? the picture luks like that ferengy gut in DS9!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

17 out of 17 people found this review useful

Heard on the radio this morning:
"It's not a question of biting the hand that feeds you, but rather not feeding the hand that bites you".

Which is probably a runner up to my favourite mixed metaphor, when one of me teachers said "You've unearthed a can of worms there". Which prompted me to ask who had been going around burying cans of worms.

Guess who's back. Back again. I'll give you a clue. It's me.

Yes, as yet more bloggers take up the new year's resolution to stop typing and go out and do something less boring instead, I obstinately remain online to artificially warp google rankings everywhere.

I flew into Newark "Liberty" International Airport yesterday, and much to my surprise found that the new inmate, sorry, immigration procedures are actually fairly swift and painless. If anything I actually got through quicker than normal, since the border patrol guard, I mean officer, dispensed with the usual facile inquiries about the purpose of my visit, and instead just made me swipe both index fingers over a scanner, smile into a cheap digital camera (couldn't spot the model, but it did look rather like those cheap Logitech webcams that you got free with every computer a couple of years ago), and swear allegiance to the great lord satan, and I was done. Meaning I got to spend an extra fifteen minutes in the baggage reclaim hall waiting for them to unload the plane that I would otherwise have spent in line in the immigration hall.

Perhaps my speedy processing was due to the fact that I'm not a gormless cretin. In a feature that I am quite tempted to title "Anchor's Wankers" (in deference to that feature on The Girlie Show called 'Wanker of the Week'. Now, whatever happened to that Sarah Cox I wonder?), let's focus on those whose sexual intercourse is forever self-inflicted. The first recipient of this accolade is the British student who told US security agents that she had a bomb in her bag.

Of course, I'm sure it was obvious that she was joking. However, the foolish girl forgot the first thing that is taught in British schools about america, which is that Americans don't apppreciate irony, sarcasm, cynicism, snideness, contrariness, or pretty much anything that traditionally passes for British humour. This is a massive oversimplification, but it works.

You might say that the US is at fault here for its anally retentive paranoia that it is prepared to arrest someone for making a joke. And perhaps you are right. But it's not as if you aren't warned that that these people have no sense of humour. To get into the country in the first place, you have to fill in a little questionairre, with questions like "Were you a member of the Nazi government of Germany between 1933 and 1945" and "Is the purpose of your visit to the united states to commit or support terrorist acts?". I'll leave the obvious gags to the various topical comedians who can be relied on to make them when necessary. The point is, it should be obvious to anyone -- and especially someone in the country on a visa, as she was -- that, sensibly or not, the BCIS [Border Control and Immigration Service] take their paranoia very seriously indeed. Under these circumstances, if you start making tedious "jokes" about having bombs in your backpack, then you are a tosser and you deserve to be locked up.

Careful readers will have guessed that this is mostly shadenfreude at seeing one of the cretins who stands in front of me joshing with the service personnel and thus delaying my day finally receiving their comeuppance. Or at least they will now that I have mentioned it.

Still, it does at least give me an idea for a film version of the events. Not quite sure what to call it. It's somewhat farcical, so the name "Carry On Luggage" rather appeals...

Help me out on this one folks -- I'm trying to track down a song that consisted of Baldrick's war poetry from Blackadder put to a techno beat. I have a worrying feeling that I dreamt the whole thing, in which case although it doesn't currently exist, it now must. Please can someone with a sampler and some remix ability now create it?

It's a good time for fans of dance music cover versions of prog rock classics. Of which I am sure that there must be many out there. The Scissor Sisters' cover version of Comfortably Numb is OK but sends me running for the original (those helium vocals are just annoying). Meanwhile, the Boogie Pimps version of Somebody to Love (the Jefferson Airplane version, not the Queen song) is also mildly inferior to the original, suffering from the sin of delaying the chorus hook until it gets quite annoying. Lastly, DJ Sammi's epic 63 minute remix of the whole of Yes's album, Tales from Topographic Oceans is as yet merely a figment of my own imagination.

Massive outpourings of shouting (shout outs? shouts out? I'll have to ask one of the passers-by what the correct one should be) to TK for playing a pretty much note-perfect Top Banana yesterday -- every song in its right place. Oh, and head over to RaW to download and treasure the radio 1 broadcast for ever. A little piece of Chris Carter can live on your hard drive for eternity.

I got the train from Leicester to Coventry on Sunday afternoon. What I'd forgotten to account for is that Sunday is the day of the week when the trains get off the tracks and go on the roads instead, just for a bit of a change. This is always a bit of fun, since without the tracks to guide them, the drivers inevitably get a bit lost and you end up taking a tour of suburbia and places where a bus just isn't supposed to go. I could tell things weren't going so well when, after having been going for more than half an hour, we passed a signpost reading "Leicester: 5 miles". It's also a bit weird when you see that there's only five passengers (normally they'd be scattered through the carriages so you might think that there are more somewhere else). Still, it's something to do, isn't it? Isn't it?

The other highlight of travelling on a Sunday is that the train/buses are only every couple of hours, so I arrived at the station with an hour to kill. This allowed me to take a quick stroll through the centre of town, and wonder why they needed quite so many policeman (about thirty) standing around outside one pub near the station. I don't know about you -- in fact, who are you? Go away! -- but the presence of large numbers of uninformed police officers always makes me extremely nervous. But nothing happened. I also managed to pick up a copy of Tony's Dodgy Dossier for the bargain price of 99p from The Works. There's a stack of about a dozen of them left if you particularly want any and can easily get to central Leicester.

Lastly, good news: my visa has arrived, and I've booked a flight back to the good old USA of America for next week. Because I'm currently in Coventry, the flight is from Gatwick and my passport, keys and dollar currency are in Maidstone, I'll be passing through the London at least twice in the next week, and will probably be hovering around in a holding pattern for a bit over the weekend. So again, as a special offer to blog readers, you can contact me and arrange a meeting, signing and book reading by contacting me at the triv.org.uk address (prepend graham and one of those a's with a circle around it to get an email address, if you really must.)

"...so he goes to a dictionary, looks up the entry, and sure enough, the definition says 'Eats assorted vegatation'."

In the current smash hit by Outkast, 'Hey Ya', where they sing "All you Beyonces, and Lucy Lius", am I the only who is tempted to shout out "and Michie Ones!"?

For that matter, Louchie Lou and Michie One: where are they now? Erm, probably where they were before, I expect.

Coming soon: an exciting blog entry about my trip back from Leicester. Don't fail to miss it.

I'm still here

That's right, I'm still cooped up in the corner of a computer room on the campus of the University of Warwick, where I probably shouldn't be anymore, with only a high-speed internet connection for warmth and the sounds of RaW1251AMBritain'sBestStudentRadioStationEver! for company. The queries for Milkshake continue to pour in: over 500 fools have landed here in their quest for enlightenment, and some crafty blogger has ripped my explanation and posted it on their blog. Still, someone soon it should fall of my front page, and we should be back to the class of person who is looking for nude pictures of Barbara Bush (and if you do find any, please keep them to yourself).

Although it's nice to visit scenes from my past, I really would prefer it if those nice Americans could return my passport and let me travel. I don't have any biometrics in it, but thankfully it's valid until 2013, so in theory I can get into the US with it. Although, next time I go in I will have to surrender my image and my thumbs to some database with a horrific acronym ("Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism", anyone?). I do feel rather like academia's version of the bag lady, which is the scuffy looking bloke who carries a large quantity of impossible to read scribbled notes and old sandwiches in a tatty old plastic bag, and who haunts the public access computer rooms looking for some impressionable youth to show his proofs to. Can I interest you in my short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem via elementary number theory that also settles the Poincare Conjecture, Riemann Hypothesis and P versus NP in one shot?

I'm typing this from a Gnome desktop on Redhat, or something similar. This is a bit of a novelty, since I've only ever used XVM or something similar before. It's a bit disconcerting, since the whole thing is clearly set up to be familiar and intuitive to previous windows user like myself, and it achieves this by throwing up random and mostly spurious error messages while I am logging in (so-and-so has unexpectedly quit, and such like). Still, it's better than... not having any computer access, I suppose.

In other news... New law means that every UK news article containing the word "office" must also contain a reference to "real life David Brents"... iPods now as tedious in Britain as they are in the US... impossible to tell whether this article in the guardian is serious or not...as predicted (privately), the "roses are red" poem attributed to GWB was actually written by Laura...

Well goodness gracious me!

I awoke this morning to the thought that the lyrics of "Goodness Gracious Me" fit perfectly to the tune of "Windmills of Your Mind"...

"Oh doctor, I'm in trouble.
Well, goodness gracious me.
For every time a certain man
Is standing next to me.
A flush comes to my face
And my pulse begins to race,
It goes boom
boody-boom
boody-boom
boody-boom-boom-boom,"

What's bothering me, is that is this an original observation, or am I just recollecting an old episode of "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue"? I'm inclined to wards the latter since I don't see why else this would have jumped into my brain unbidden.

Where are they now?

#1 - Me.

I (or at least, my corporeal presence) is currently on visa exile in the Canley / Coventry / University of Warwick area. This probably isn't of much interest to the Kelis lyric explanation searching fraternity, nor most likely to anyone else. However, on the offchance that anyone else who knows me is reading this, and is also in the vicinity, then do get in touch. Else, I shall spend the next couple of weeks working on my monograph on bee keeping in virtual seclusion.

Other things worth noting briefly:

Something of the darkness The Michael Howard credo does just about fit if you sing it to the tune of "I believe in a thing called love", so long as you speak really quickly. NB: this only works in my head.

It's a mad world world world world Instead of taking Tears for Fears songs and slowing them down and making sound really sad, why not try speeding them up, putting on a ukele backing track, and performing them in a George Formby stylee?

Oh, I find it kind of funny
And I find it kind of sad
That the dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had!
Ooo - Mad world, crazy world,
Mr. Wu, window cleaners too,
'Cos I'm hanging from a lampost at the corner of the street
in case a certain little lady comes by

etc.