Things Which are Pissing Me off Today
1. Knives and Forks.
Apparently sales of knives are half those of forks in the UK at the moment. This has been attributed to the rise in ready meals, which come chopped into nice easy little bits, presumably because they think you’ve got flippers for fucking hands and can’t cut up your own food. Either that or they have no confidence in your ability to use utensils properly and fear lawsuits from people who accidentally stab themselves in the back of their hand with a fucking fork whilst trying to eat their dinner.
But it’s not the prevalence of shitty, poisonous ready meals which is getting on my tits, it’s basic table manners. You see it in movies all the time: people who are actually eating normal food doing so with only a fucking fork. They cut using the edge, and then turn it upside down, with the curve facing towards the plate like it was a fucking spoon, and then stab everything up into one great big kebab and shovel the resulting abomination down their fucking cakeholes.
Someone sitting leaning on their left elbow shovelling food in in this manner simply has no table manners. You cover your mouth when you yawn, you hold the door open for people and you USE A FUCKING KNIFE WHEN YOU EAT. Who were you fucking raised by, goats?
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2. The Rain.
It’s fucking July for fuck’s sake.
The Builders and the Butchers – When it Rains (Daytrotter Session)
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3. Copyright on Stupid Things
I am trying to sort out the artwork for our vinyl releases and the company I’m dealing with have templates for the artwork which I can download and print, but can’t open in a graphics package because they are fucking copyright protected. So I can print them off and waste my fucking time copying out the bastarding things, but I can’t actually just open them and drop in my artwork, which would be a million times easier. And from their perspective, it helps their customers and virtually guarantees they get artwork to the correct fucking specifications. Whose damn life does it make any easier to have this fucking shit locked, for Christ’s fucking sake, and how can anyone lose any money by making them freely accessible? It’s just a series of dimensions and a list of basic instructions for fuck’s sake, locking it off is just a massive and pointless fucking waste of everyone’s time.
Dead Kennedys – Stealing People’s Mail
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4. Trees.
Actually trees are not pissing me off today. I had a long walk to the bank at lunchtime when it was pissing it down, but I was able to walk under the trees and stay dry, so today I like trees very much.
Eef Barzelay – Make Another Tree
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5. Toilet Brushes.
Seriously, my colleagues seem not to know what they are for. I would be only too happy to fucking demonstrate – with some vigour.
The Coathangers – Don’t Touch My Shit
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Generally, though, I think you would agree that I am not an angry man.
I like Beirut. The band. I’ve never been to the country but I’d like to.
Do you know what’s pissing me off today?
This thing:
ÿ
It’s like a lower case letter Y with an umlaut thingy on top, and it’s used as a field delimiter when XML documents have been transferred into text documents.
Today I’m reading lots of XML documents that have been transferred into text documents.
It just turns every word into an adjective, and you soon stop seeing the funny side.
Don’t you mean the funnÿ side?
No, on second thoughts you probably most definitely do not mean that.
Ben, I am sure the Great Nation of Beirut is devastated that you can’t make it.
I’m having a day off, life is great and drinking coffee whilst watching pretty girls is a beautiful past time
Do you normally not like trees Matthew? What have the poor things ever done to you?
I’m with you on the rain thing though.
Can’t make it YET. I’ll get there Matthew. I’ll get there.
The fact that I cannot justify sharing the extraordinarily involved & long story about the person who has fucked me off immeasurably over the last few days (because it is SO very long) pisses me off right now.
Okay, I found something. I manually drawing exon junctions on DNA sequences. Total arse. I should go home, but a tiny part of me wants to get this mind numbingly dull task finished.
Wow. There’s a lot of anger there.
I tend to just eat everything with a spoon.
Like Becky. A tiny tiny little spoon.
Just don’t ask her what she eats.
And Chutters, don’t you dare mock me with your fun and your relaxation. That’s just… well, mean.
I used to share a house with someone who was scared of trees and was also more than a little perturbed by the hedge in the front garden.
Weirdly, he was perfectly ok with the marijuana plants growing in plant pots in the living room. In fact, they were his plants.
Was there a size limit, beyond which they became scary, or were they always his friend no matter how tree-like they might become?
Mouse brains, I know.
I’ve held/chopped quite a few human brains, actually. But not with a spoon, so I shall grudgingly concede that knives are sometimes necessary.
Also, I read that article, and it is full of disgusting snobbery.
What on earth is a fish knife? (A knife for fish, presumably.) I eat my fish raw and wriggling, and with my hands, just like Gollum.
I know what a fish knife is but I have no real idea why they are necessary.
Mouse foetus brains, please!
Did you use a special brain-chopping knife, or will any old kitchen knife do the trick?
A special brain chopper, yes. Though I suspect you can make do with any old knife, given a little effort.
(There is also something a little like a cheese-slicer that I have seen used on rat brains.)
YOU CAN’T MAKE DO WITH ANYTHING!!!! Good lord no, not on this post, not today! Today you must dissect your pile of brains with the proper cutlery held in the proper manner, garnished properly and served with the correct wine!
TWOTH:
Did the person that was scared of trees ever notice what his house was made of? Or was the place more like the 3rd little pigs house?
Fish knives are actually really good for lifting the flesh from whole fish cooked on the bone.
Probably because that’s precisely what they were designed for, but they are remarkably better at it than a normal dinner knife.
I like fish knives.
Today I hate, no, detest PR bitches who think that you perhaps OWE them a spot on your webpage because they sent you something in the mail. Ya know what? They can just fuck the fuck off because they have a JOB and get PAID and well, you know the rest…
Let it suffice to say that people who hold grudges only make themselves look bad in the end
and I am so in love with Beirut after seeing them this past weekend!!! xoxox
Forks are fucking ace. Fuck chopsticks.
I like chopsticks.
Not for things like hamburgers of course – they have their place – but in general chopsticks are splendid things.
Watching Mrs. Toad fumble about with them and slowly get more and more annoyed only adds to their excellence.
I once met Cerys Matthews from Catatonia when I was waiting tables in a restaurant.
She was a delight, a genuinely warm and open person, but the she revealed one celebrity eccentricity when her food arrived and she produced an small, ornate, exquisitely inlaid wooden box which contained a pair of equally ornate and exquisitely inlaid chopsticks, which she proceeded to eat her dinner with.
She had barbecue chicken and chips.
She must have a black belt in chop suey to use them for that sort of thing.
So where has our Dylan gone? I’m sure he’d have some interesting stories to add. Perhaps people he’s met, odd things he’s eaten with unsual utensils?
I’m an American, so all I need is a spoon, or as Homer Simpson calls it, “that metal dealie you use to … dig … food.”
Chopsticks are excellent for things like chicken and chips, because you can just impale your food with them. Noodles are far tricker.
Have I already told the story of my first date? Ex con, just released, he was 21, took me to the dog track and regaled me with stories of sporks… the indignities of prison life could apparently be boiled down to the spork. This from a man who asked for the picture menu at Denny’s.
And people wonder why some of us refuse to shave our legs and turn to “carpet munching” as Himself so loves to say?
Oh and Mrs. Toad, one quick stab to the nether region would probably end his amusement with chopsticks. Just enough to hurt, not enough for a trip to the surgery, mind you
That quote’s from my favourite Simpsons episode – when Homer sends away for a subliminal weight-loss tape, but they send him one to improve your vocabulary instead..
“That’s a machiavellian countenance. Aha! A sextet of ales!”
Yeah I’m quite convinced now, nineballs you’ve gone and outed yerself. Step up and just use yer real name, Dylan dearie xoxox
I feel we’ve missed a trick by not commenting on how levels of knife crime haven’t fallen, despite a fall in the sale of knives.
That could have been funny, if one of you lot had got a hold of it first.
That would have been fucking hilarious if only we’d been quicker off the mark.
Curse our custardy brains.
We should always be thankful for trees.
And opossable thumbs
The only song i’ve done that made me any cash Was called Think about the trees.
sorry if i bore anyone with that pointless fact.
How did that make you money, if I am allowed to ask? It wasn’t in a bog roll advert was it?
Top typo, Tart! Opossable thumbs sound brilliant – like a cross between impossible and an Opossum.
“You with your mere human thumbs have a pitiful fraction of the dexterity which I can achieve with my magnificent impossible Opossum thumbs!”
It was a commissioned for a Art gallery in Sunderland as part of a exhibition. I had the song looped and Transmited to a old retro style radio. Infact you could bring your own radio in and tune into it yourself if you wanted, Well thats what i wanted people to try to do.
oh i could of sworn i had opossable thumbs?
Nice, who is welsh out there
Opposable perhaps, but not opossable.
I am slightly Welsh, Chutters. My Granddad’s Welsh anyway, so that make up about, what, a quarter?
Oh whatever … I was in the bath whilst typing … So sue me :p
Now that’s where impossible Opossum thumbs would come in really useful!
And why would I sue you when I can mock you for far more fun and far less cost?
I just won tickets for Sonisphere!!
My fucking Friday feeling has up’d and left me, bastard
Nice one Ravie.
Chutters, fill in your Friday Five – that’ll cheer you up.