NCIS

Los Angeles…

So whilst I’m having a bitch about tv programs we watch, and yes I am fully aware of where the off button is or even how to change channel thank you; I though I’d just pass comment about this latest version of NCIS. We never watched the previous incarnations of this show, but thought we’d give this one ago, it having Batman’s sidekick in.

But it was all a bit flat and formulaic to be honest. Firstly LL Cool J seems to spend most of his time stamping around telling everyone who will listen that he’s a Special Forces SEAL! I’ve known a few SF chaps, most of them elderly gentleman now, and being British obviously of a much higher quality and calibre than anything that’s going to come out of the USA. But they don’t go around telling everyone that they are Special Forces, that just not what they do. They were all mild mannered, incredibly laid back and affable blokes till they need to be otherwise. And they weren’t big muscle bound chaps either, tending to be around 5ft 8″ and slight to stocky of build. This concept that SF blokes are all muscle bound monsters is crap. And then there’s his car, I don’t know what it is, but it’s big and loud, not very subtle really is it for a stakeout and such like? Anyone seeing a hint of Miami Vice here?

The noob character played by Adam Craig is totally unbelievable. This is supposed to be a crack unit of investigators, this guy looks like he’s going to wet himself, and appears to have had no training what so ever, so how come he got the job?

Rocky Carrol looks like he should be some sort Alexander O’Neal  tribute act, and in no way gives off any vibe of being in charge or in fact believable.

And at no point did Chris O’Donnell don his Robin outfit, which my wife found most disappointing.

To be fair the story line was ok, and dialogue was ok… if a little trite. Was hoping for more. Meanwhile, part 2 of Modern Family is on tonight, cried laughing at episode so am hoping for more of the same from this.

Bones

Bones: I want to like it, mainly cause my wife enjoys it and watches it all the time, I think it used to be quite good, but just recently they seem to have become really bad caricatures of themselves; I mean that Bones woman, good grief, who rude can she get?

And then there’s the plot lines, let’s take the last one we watched: Firstly it involves a rotting corpse being eaten by a herd of feral cats. Cats won’t eat rotten meat, they’ll eat some pretty heinous things but rotten meat is not one of them. Then said ’scientists’ collect feral cats into cat boxes to take them back to the lab so they can examine their poo. Wait whilst I stop laughing. Anybody who has ever owned a cat, knows that for 90% of them, trying to get them into a carry box is akin to undertaking the Tet Offensive. I’d pay money to watch someone trying to get a feral cat in one. You’d need full body armour, a tranquilliser team and some medics. So the concept of just scooping them up and wandering off with them is quite frankly arse. I mean you can’t even get near a feral cat, let alone pick them up. It didn’t go onto explain what happened back at the lab when they got there. Or what they did with them one they’d finished the poo collection.

And then there’s the idea that a bright silver Aston Martin DB9 with it’s windows shot out, sitting in plain view on a side street in down town Washington DC would not go unnoticed for any length of time…

And did I mention how week on week that Bones woman gets increasingly rude with people, I mean how many people get to be verbally abused each week before one of them ends up going; “Oi you freak show, slap!”

What’s more bemusing, apart from the fact that people watch it, oh no, I guess that’s it, people write it like that, cause people watch it. Sigh, I’ll get my coat.

Saturday

Junior: “Anybody want to play wii tennis?”

D: “I’ve just spent the whole day cleaning every room in the house, the bathrooms, the bedrooms, changed the beds, polished every surface, bleached the work surfaces, cleaned the living room, the kitchen, sorted out clothes, washing and I’ve even washed the god damn skirting boards. And now I’ve got to go shopping.” Pause for breath…

Junior: “You could have just said no.”

.

Dargnammit.

Walking Day

It was Walking Day in the village yesterday and then the fete last night in a marquee on the cricket pitch – all sounds very middle England, and to be fair, it probably is.

We caught the tail end of the procession, some men in white frocks who look suspiciously like Druids, with their white hair, white robes and tall staffs, striding down the High Street from one end of the village to another, looking very serious and very (self) important. They were followed by children of various youth organisations, brass bands, Morris Men, Morris Woman, tractors decorated with flowers pulling carts filled with more flowers and small children waving at grandparents and neighbours: All very civilised. Oh and there was a whole cloud of parents buzzing around the procession. It was a perfect day, blue skies and high fluffy white cloud

We didn’t got to the fete, we didn’t fancy paying the £15:00 each or £60:00 for all of us to go sit in a big smelly tent at the other end of the village eating posh bacon butties, listening to some wedding band murder what were once barely acceptable records. Besides we could sit in the comfort of our own living room, open the windows and listen to them as it was. And it wouldn’t have cost us £60:00 for the privilege. And this is what we did, and has been the case for every village fete since we have lived here, the heavens opened; the rain was biblical. It was really nice sitting here listening to it hammer down. It was that loud that it very nearly drowned out the noise of the fete. I bet it was really loud in the marquee.

Expensive Pager

So my new Orange mobile would at least whilst I am at home, be nothing more than an expensive pager. For whilst there is enough signal for people to phone me, there isn’t enough signal for me to either hear them or actually speak to them. So it seems I get to phone them back on the land line. Cosmic.

Mainly Apples

Image by Denis Collette…!!! via Flickr

It’s known amongst family and friends that I can’t stand beer in any of its forms (stout, ale, bitter, mild, larger etc). I think it’s the taste. For starters I’ve got a relatively sweet tooth, so by definition anything called bitter is not going to appeal to me. I have tried, but after a couple of mouthfuls I just know that the impending mess from the projectile vomit is not worth the effort when there are plenty of other reality altering fluids available. I can drink vodka till it comes out my nose and frequently do, but that’s another story.

Despite my dislike of such things I do go to our local beer festival, which is not as weird as it first sounds. There’s a ‘normal’ bar there, so I can stand and sip my vodka and mixer of choice whilst watching my friends crumble into incoherence as the last pint of Bishop’s Nobbrot or Whapweasel slams through their shuddering synapses. This year though, the bar was closed: Calamity; no vodka. No nothing, other than what was in the gloomy looking barrels piled up behind the make shift bench across the back of the church hall.

There was an entrance fee, for the life of my I can’t remember what it was, but you got a pint pot with the date and event printed on the side, so you can look back fondly on the event, reminiscing about the huge blankness where your memory used to be. And you got to purchase some tickets which you traded for beer at the back. Oh and a program listing all the beers, which you could tick off as you worked your way through them: All very civilised, all very English.

But what was I going to drink? I stood there pondering for some time, long enough for my friends to return with various coloured inebriants, which they held up to the light and eyed warily. They were shared around, everybody had a sip of everybody elses. I found they either made my toes curl or one eye go into spasm and my saliva glands slam shut. On flicking through the program once more I spied a small suspicious section labelled ‘ciders’. Crivens, I’d not drunk cider since I was about 14, and even then I think it was mixed with lemonade. These were manly, organic, 7%+ ciders. Was that good or bad? My friends all pulled a face at the idea, but something made from apples had to be sweeter than the oaty, barley, hoppy bitter things they were all standing around chewing.

You got to use own glass all night, the one they’d given you as you walked in and it had been established early on, that if you went for a pint and you had a pint pot, then you got a pint. This is not only stating the bleeding obvious but could also lumber you with a whole pint of something that sounded glorious in the even program but actually tasted like Satan’s Piss. Better to get a half, (and half price) and go back for more if you really liked it. And because these were hand poured from the barrels, you usually ended up with 2/3 or 3/4 of a pint, so you got more bang for your buck. In these credit crunch times, it made perfect sense. It all seemed like a win-win situation: Till your legs fell off.

I tried each of the ciders. The first one was surprisingly refreshing, slightly cloudy, tasted like tin and smelt of pickled onions. And to be honest the others didn’t get any better, one was akin to licking a battery. Having tried them all I settled on the 8% organic one, as by that time I didn’t care. It was a surprisingly clear, golden liquid, the colour of mead or some Norse Goddess’s pubic hair. It’s taste was hard to describe, it didn’t taste like mead for sure. It had cleansing, acrid, napalm like affect. It seemed to dilute the light in the room but that could have been the fumes coming off it. It wasn’t long before I realised that my lower jaw and eyes had somehow become slightly dislocated and were inhabiting a small but subtly different space time continuum to the rest of me. It was a bit like an out of body experience with all the fun taken out. I felt like I had to grip the floor with my toes so I didn’t fall off.

All of this was being compounded by the thumping beat and wailing brass section of a band playing 1920’s 1930’s jazz. Nice. What was nice was the blessed silence that erupted when we staggered outside. The biting, bone gouging wind was now merely fresh as we had donned our invisible yet surprisingly warm alcfrl coats. It was time to leave, one of my friends was quite concerned and wanted to confirm that his legs still worked, the others mute with glee as they had reached double figures: Enough for any mortal. So we ambled back into town and slumped in a corner of a student bar, to sip on something refreshing, sweet, mass produced and non-confrontational.

The uncertainty of measuring smaller than light particles

“… It’s about trying to measure a smaller than light particle – you only get part of the information you want. High energy small wave function methods alter the energy of the system you are looking at; the particles you are using impart some of their energy into the system you are trying to measure, thus the system is altered by the act of measuring. Low energy, less intrusive particles have a longer wave-length and thus contain less data. This leads to uncertainty. The ultimate outcome is that you either know the speed or the location but not both, to this you can only suggest a probability. According to something I read elsewhere…”

Four Chops Five People

Image by naotakem via Flickr

So a good friend of ours, who is just one of the world’s loveliest people, was telling us recently about how she had forgotten she had invited her friend around for Sunday tea. Her guest turned up on the doorstep, with dessert and a bottle of wine looking forward to a Sunday roast. Our friend already had four pork chops in the oven, for herself, her husband and her two kids… the guest commented how lovely the chops smelled and had arrived just in the knick of time as dinner was about to be served. Not wishing to embarrass herself or her friend by owning up to the fact that she had forgotten she was coming, nor having anything else in to eat, came up with a plan so cunning… etc. She took some slices of white bread, broke them up, then moulded the crumbs into a pork chop shape and poured gravy over this fake chop. Once it was on the plate, covered in gravy it looked exactly like the others, a little too exactly, because instead of keeping the fake-chop for herself, she inadvertently ended up with a real chop. Of course once at the table she couldn’t say anything to the rest of the family, like ‘which one of you has the chop made from bread crumbs?’ so just hoped that they wouldn’t say anything in front of her guest. The meal passed without further incident and the guest left some time late in the evening. Our friend then questioned her family, ‘which one of you had the fake chop made from bread crumbs’ when they’d all stopped laughing it transpired that none of them had, they’d all had real chops. Which meant that the guest had ended up with the fake one made from bread. And you know what? The friend has never said a thing. She must think that, that was the weirdest pork chop she ever had, or that they’d suddenly gone vegetarian and it was made from quorn or nuts or something. Either way, the moral is, that if you are going to fake pork chops using white bread and gravy, be sure to mark the plate someway, because like so much in life, until you bite down, you never can really tell what it is.

ScribeFire

ScribeFire test

Tiscali, my arse.

Last night I went to the folks for a cup of tea and they happen to mention that their internet hadn’t worked for the last 24 hours, so being of a kindly persuasion I has a look at their computer. Which appears to be functioning fine. As does their router. I re-boots the router and the p.c. and still nothing.

So Ma phones Tiscali Tech Support, and spends a stupefyingly, ridiculous length of time navigating a selection of soul crushing menus before being put through to a real life human being. He then asks her all sorts of seemingly unrelated question (like her birthday and post code) to establish that she is in fact the paying customer and not some brownian-motion mad woman who happens to have phoned up tech support in a random attempt to get a complete strangers broadband working again.

It very quickly became apparent that Ma had no idea as to the answers that this tech support person was asking, so she passed him over to me. He asks me if the computer plugs into a modem or a router.

“It’s a wireless router.” I reply.

He then asks me if there is a cable connecting the router to the computer.

This causes me to pause for thought, and ponder the relevance of any answers I am likely to give him in the near future.

To avoid being sarcastic and rude to a complete stranger on the phone, through gritted teeth, I pointed out that “no there isn’t a cable between the router and the computer as in fact it is a wireless router….”

He seems completely non-plussed by this sudden and dramatic turn of events and charges on with his questions with reckless abandon. He asks me to establish what lights are on the router and what colour they are.

“There are 4 lights and there are all green.”

“Is there a power light on?”

“Yes”

“And is it green?”

“Yes all lights are green. If there was no power and therefore no power light, surely there would be no lights, green or otherwise?”

He ignores my pertinent question and blunders on. He asks me to switch the router off, then switch the p.c. off, then switch the p.c. back on, then switch the router on. He then asks me to confirm the green lights on the router, and try accessing the internet again. No change, still not working.

He then asks me to take the yellow cable and plug the cable from the router into the back of the computer.

“What yellow cable?”

“The one that came with the router?”

“I have no idea where that is?”

“We can’t proceed without the yellow cable.”

“Why not?”

“Because… we need to establish that the computer is talking to the router properly”

“It is talking to the router properly, because I can see the router on the p.c., I can see the wireless network from the p.c., I can see the code name of the network/router on the p.c. The p.c. can see the router!”

“Yes but there might be a fault with the wireless network and we need to establish that if it is a fault with your computer or the wireless network or the phone line?”

He then goes on to tell me that if it’s a fault with the computer we need to take it back to the vender. If it’s a fault with the wireless network then we will need to make alternative arrangements as Tiscali don’t support wireless networks. And to do this we need the yellow cable.

I was nearly flummoxed by this, not least because his English was appalling and Ma was waving a yellow cable in my face telling me she’d found it at the back of a draw. It then dawned on me what he had just said.

“What do you mean you don’t support wireless networks? You sold us the wireless router in the first place, not that many months ago, how can you provide the equipment and not provide any technical support afterwards? The main reason the folks went with Tiscali was the wireless ’service’ you were offering.”

There then followed a snowstorm of words that were utterly meaningless, unintelligible and unrelated. I swear he had just kicked a scrabble board in the air and was reading words that he could see scattered around him. This tirade of random words went on for quite some time. I have no idea what he said. This problem has raised it’s head before and once again I will state the obvious; in any business transaction both parties being able to clearly understand what each other are communicating is FUCKING essential for a successful outcome. I take my hat off to this guy he obviously speaks more languages than I do, I’ve just got the 1, at least he seems to have at least 1.5 maybe 1.6 languages.

Having clearly established that we are going nowhere with this person, I then go on further to waste my breath and several minutes of my life which I won’t get back, to point out that having been offered our wireless setup which they are now saying they don’t support, the router is something like 17 feet away from the computer and the 2.5 foot yellow cable is not going to reach. It’s going to require considerable re-wiring, moving of the tv and other such endeavors to even get close, not to mention the finding of a telephone extension cable which they don’t have. He then asks if we would like him to wait on the line whilst we plug the yellow cable in. I sigh, and die a little inside, this man is clearly fixated on the yellow cable and not listening to a bloody thing I am saying.

I thank him, say good bye and tell them we will call them back. Leaving the folks to ponder the acquisition or lending of a considerable telephone cable extension.

The next morning, I get an email from them, it’s all working again, no idea what the problem was, but somebody, somewhere fixed it.

I’ve never had any dealings with Tiscali before, and I’ve got to say that on a balanced, first impression point of view, their tech support was pointless, unintelligible and quite frankly utter bollocks. I wouldn’t trust them to find their arses with a map, both hands and the freaking light on. What a complete waste of time: Someone should sue the useless fucks for trades description or something because 1) they are providing wireless solutions which they are then refusing to support and 2) they have no concept of the meaning of the word support (be it customer or technical). In my humble, personal opinion.