insert title here

I would just like to take this opportunity to wish all of my occasional reader the best of what you think you'd like as we head into this new/next /biggest whatever.

Over the past few days I have read a few things that make you go "wtf" and in some cases the nimble juxtaposition of some of these may have made the occasional reader go "hmmm....amateur" but fortunately I've forgotten them and, in any case, mere reporting here or even highlighting of the ironic juxtaposition would not have added to the sum of human understanding.

Ummm, offspring no 1 and I have been watching the Test and we have been...yeah, well, you know an' all.

Again, may you have all things and stuff.

let's go

Well not the actual title of the song but right in the groove for a Friday night.

It still makes me smile...as do some of the comments.

Reaching even further back into the recesses of the memory, we get this. Holy moley, there are actually some memories not exterminated by the quantities of beer that used to accompany going to a barn where these blokes might be playing.

Good times....

ub (bs) 40

So I'm browsing one of my favourite time-wasters, Listopia, and I run across this.

"WTF?" I think to myself because, as you know, most thinking is mainly internal or, as some would have it, mental.

So I'm mentally thinking to myself about wtf is this so I have to google it and I get there. For reasons that are usually described as "unaccountable", which is in fact a euphemism for "wtf?", I decide to look at the one which "explains" the strip, rather than the strip itself.

Here is a random selection of one, I now bid you bye-bye for some two to three months.

I just love the deadpan reconstruction of the strip which is mimicked totally by the commenters. One can only marvel in the fact that there are squillions of people out there doing this sort of stuff, when in point of fact most of them should be heavily sedated and kept in lion cages.

With lions.

Anyway, I now know about ubbs.

turn the beat around

In this extract we turn the protagonists around, thusly: "Meanwhile, in other news the conservative NZ government presses on with a PP ploy to deliver UFB - which is to say Ultra Fast Broadband - to 70% of the citizenry at speeds approaching 100 mbps. Naturally the Labor opposition fiercely opposes the waste and the extravagance, and condemns the plan as certain to fail. Which leaves the citizenry lost in a wasteland featuring the most appalling and expensive broadband service to be found in an allegedly civilised country ... Mention viewing videos on the full to overflowing intertubes and contemplate the blank faces. Viz and to wit, indeed. If you are of suitable disposition you can read the whole thing, follow the links to the Sheehan article, poke your eyeballs out while reading that, then note that the comments which follow are hardly supportive of that same poor benighted journo. And they reckon that News Ltd moderates its comments pages? Hardly! Mind you, they are in an increasing spot of bother in the Old Dart, eh what?

am I ever

(gonna see your face again) The politicosphere is so shallow (I'd like to create a verb from shallow as I believe it could become, like, so institutionalised and, like, ubiquitous and stuff) so I ain't gonna be writin' about none o'that sheeeeeeet evah again. unless John Howard comes back. But other stuff, well it, like, you know. So I'm just gonna have to share it with everybody, like, you know.

push pineapple

The column is average, the photo is highly disturbing, the comments are priceless:

"They look like Phil Tufnell on acid and Jimmy Hill in drag. I bet their sex life is awesome"

"Must get my husband a Santa suit. He's just in from the pub and said ok "

"are they from the planet agadoo"

....and by far the best and this week's wiiiiiineeeerrrr....



"Urinal Ritchie? I prefer Eurethra Franklin."

get a haircut and get a real job

As someone who has laboured within the machine - or more accurately but superfluously, a series of machines - for some 40 years, I was mightily taken with Ms Pants' stories about some of her recent encounters with the bureaucracy. Tales of the entirely expected, as it were. So taken was I that I sent the link to a number of friends and one replied with a description of some of his own experiences. Read on...

"Coincidentally when I first got up here I had a similar experience(s). I went to one of the recognised employment agencies with my resume, and after some banal questioning they said I should do a Word and Excel test.

I said, 'didn't you read my resume, I've been working in IT for thirty years.'

She said, 'sorry sir, it's our policy that you do a Word and Excel test and also a typing test.'

(Yes, they made me do a typing test as well!).

I finished the test and she said I did well on the Word test, but my Excel and typing were only average. I replied that the difference between being average and excellent on the Excel test was only about four hours and in any case I wasn't looking for a data entry position.

I just got up and walked out and never heard from them again.

Amazing experience.

At another place across the road they asked me to sign an agreement to lock me into their services and I said I'd take the long document home to read and bring it back.

Well, the roof fell in...should've seen the woman's face drop. 'You can't do that...take this away from the office!'

Me: 'But I want to read it properly before I sign it.' The manager was called, papers were rustled, faces were frowned. No, I could not take it away and read it. I had to read it right there.

I got up and walked out. This time I rang DEST and got onto a nice bloke who was horrified. He got onto them ,they rang me and apologised and said I could take the paper away. I didn't bother."

There is of course a somewhat ironic twist to posting this blog. Despite hours of searching for fixes, I am still unable to copy and paste between programs. Thus, I had to type his story out in full. And no, I am not a good typist.

little white bull

What with it being Friday an' all, you need some light ennertainment.

Here it is:

Goya, Picasso, García Lorca, Hemingway, Orson Welles and recently Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear have handled bulls in such a way as to prove their artistic
importance.

Do have a lovely weekend.

Oh, NB: this isn't about bullfighting.

horse with no name

As I keep saying, you get much better comments in the UK papers. The election this week has whipped up a storm of tired old cliches.....oh, sorry, no, that was me. No, the sub themes apparent in the comments are just fascinating. The hatred of Gordon Brown not because of anything he may or may not have done, but because he's a Scot. Anything that's not absolute laissez faire is labelled as socialism or communism. And, of course, the whole disillusion with manufactured, tightly controlled political campaigns. Which the Poms don't have to themselves, of course.

.. The whole comments string here is a cracker, but here are two I liked, for different reasons:

When I was in the UK it seemed to me that the virulent marxist types were the ones who tended to live in squalor, he was usually dressed in old dirty ex army stuff , had a bag of roll up baccy in his pocket, didn't understand the complexities of shaving and tended towards habits such as picking his nose and eating it. left school at 14 and never worked a day in his life but was adept at finding others of the same ilk to bond with. Often has strong homosexual tendencies when drunk.The women similarly left secondary modern without a o level to their name and usually because they were pregnant, tends to live in council flats with giant TV in every room but otherwise also in filthy squalor with up to 8 children who's fathers names were either on the local constabulary roster or in prison for importuning or some such offense, Either way the mother of these unfortunate children had no recollection due to the long hours spend drinking during school hours.Is it starting to ring any bells san toi, stefanie jameson, or is it still a blur.whatever you are , that's the ideology you support and that's what broon has made the standard rather than eliminating these scum from society.That's why he is such a LOSER

I like Socialists, but I couldn't afford a whole one.

i want a new drug

I found one.

This is totally against Nature! People are meant to starve. Is an incentive for them to go to Church. Once you start feeding people who should rightly be dead, Heaven will be empty!

There is just so much goodness in this big wide wonderful world. I want someone to pay what I earn now - oh all right, pay me what I'm worth.....aaaagh OK, pay me a bit less than that - fuck it then pay me a lot less - so I can just trawl blogs all day.

I want to turn to blancmange.

Oh OK, I'm already blancmange, I wanna be more sort of custard-like.

Whatever.

trudge over bribbled water (*)

Surely this is a bridge too far:

Many young economists, scientifically oriented and so recognizing
the superiority of free markets, found the climate intellectually
stultifying.

Out of context of course, but jeez, really? Are all scientists free-marketeers? Someone need a little basic logic to get them to the end of their article?

If you want a countervailing argument to how free market ideas actually get promulgated, try this.

Alternatively, just bash your head into the computer while reading the comment stream of consciousness on whether Britain is broken. Just be prepared - you'll need several hours, not least because you can't put all comments on one page. Maybe Britain is broken.

(*) possibly not the correct title...

send in the clowns

We went to the local club tonight - we do this occasionally for exactly the same reasons that tens of thousands of our fellow Aussies do on a Saturday night: Mrs VVB doesn't have think about what to have for dinner, and I don't have to wash up.

We sat outside, it's warm but the onshore breeze is some consolation, although not as much as if it had been cooler.

Being patriotic Aussies we thought we'd better do the right thing and put a couple of dollars through the pokies.

Mind you, we haven't thought of doing this on previous visits...

Anyway, and this is where the story really begins, the last time either of us played a poker machine you had to put 20 cents in and pull a lever.

It's a bit more complicated now. The only reason it took us 5 minutes, rather than 5 seconds, to lose $2 was because we couldn't figure out which buttons to press.

There is an upside, of course. From now on we can go to the club and benefit from the subsidised food and drink, restful in the knowledge that we can't do the 'right thing' and put a few bucks through the pokies because we're too stupid to use them.

Earlier today I thought of a funny, and being of somewhat vindictive nature I thought I should share it.

Imagine, if you will, a crowd of Kevin Rudd supporters at a protest...

"What do we want?"

"Programmatic specificity!"

"When do we want it?"

"In the fullness of time!"

Laugh? I thought I'd never start.

dance away

Note to makers of TV dance shows:

• rolling on the floor is not dancing


• calisthenics is not dancing


• lifting somebody is not dancing, unless it is interspersed with actual dancing


• just waggling your jangly bits and shuddering a lot is not dancing


• 'popping' certainly is not dancing.

What is dancing?

• ballet (without rolling on the floor or calisthenics)


• the Quickstep


• the Pride of Erin


• the Canadian Two-Step


• waltzing.

Also, comparing a national style of dance with some made-up contemporary rubbish is rubbish. Apples, oranges, pears. Also Calisthenics.

Sometimes you run across somebody who has Something Important to say to you, but they just can't articulate it.

Here's one I discovered earlier.

Many might truly believe that such is the Day to Day/ZeroDay to
ZeroDay Reality that Politicians Spin to their Own Sadly Crooked Advantage, for Great Vision and Advanced Intelligence is Missing from their Penny Dreadful Arsenals/Treasuries/MetaDataBase Mines which are Fixated on Hiding Dirty Secrets rather Eliminating and Illuminating Enlightening Secrets.

My response to this can be found in the venerable text of the Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever:

Always, no, sometimes, think it's me
but you know I know and it's a dream
I think I know, I mean, err yes, but it's all wrong
that is, I think I disagree.

one world

You'll get "hours of fun reading the comments. The Trilateral Commission, the Jews, take away our guns at your peril, socialists in Canada, Obamascare, the Second Amendment, you only get true reporting in Britain, communists, bring back Joe McCarthy, the smell of sulfur (sic), the Second Revolution...

Looks like 2010 is going to be a waaaay baaaad year.

Courtesy of the ever-reliable sPeak you're bRanes.

30 odd foot of grunts

Here comes another one...

Here it comes again...

Here comes another one....

When will it ever end?

it's wonderful wonderful

Some teasers:

I got a beef with Jay cos I don't know what his game is / Sucka says that Updike blows when compared with Martin Amis.

GO GO GADGET GONADS!

Now go here and I doubt you'll be back.