Deja Vu

Right, that's it. T is no longer allowed in bathrooms. I know it's going to be difficult but that's how it's got to be; she's jinxed you see. You may recall back in September she became trapped in a bathroom in our hotel in Florence? Well it happened again yesterday at home. That's right, in the safe, comfortable bosom of Schossadlerflug another saboteur bathroom door lay in wait waiting to pounce. And yesterday morning it pounced. Poor T, trapped in our tiny windowless bathroom with nothing but a collection of lady washing, conditioning, moisturising, cleansing and toning products to keep her company. I was dozing when I realised that she's been gone a little while and then came the little wail of distress. The door opening mechanism had just failed with her trapped inside. You turned the handle and the magic did not occur. The lock worked perfectly but the actual latch? Not so much. In fairness T was much calmer than I, though I am going to put that down to her enforced passivity in the circumstances.

I intend to track down the architect of our flat and give him or her a piece of my mind. Though I hadn't realised until yesterday, because I'd never had cause to look before, the bathroom door in our flat essentially seals itself into the door frame. The old dodge of pushing a credit card over the latch to disengage it doesn't work because you can't get at the edge of the door. I also was unable to pass any cards, tiny screwdrivers or such under the door to T as that too was sealed against the door jamb. It seems to be less of a regular bathroom door and more of an airlock.

A couple of shoves with my shoulder failed to jar anything into working again so I set to work prising the front of the handle cover off and then unscrewing as much of the mechanism as I could get at. Eventually I got the handle off and was able to use a pair of pliers to turn the latch spindle much further round than you could just with handle. This, just, did the trick and we were able to pop the door open, a relief for a freed T and a relief for me as I really needed the little boys' room quite urgently. Needs must when the devil drives as they say.

Nasty Comments

So Blogger has compulsorily "improved" Blogger by adding these comment boxes at the bottom of everyone's posts. Whether it's because I'm using Linux and Firefox or something else I don't know but I can't post comments on anyone else's blog (sorry Churlita and Booda Baby I did try today - again) and nor can I post comments on my own blog.

As commenting is one of the principle things that sets a blog apart from any other online publishing I feel this blog is a bit redundant until comments work again - without comments it just feels like screaming into the wind. If you are able to post comments please could leave one on this post saying what operating system and browser you're using as it might help me work out what's going on and how I might get some functionality back. Thanks all and sorry for the outage of intercourse (no sniggering at the back).

When Too Much Choice is a Bad Thing

On Saturday morning, as T was curled up in bed grumbling with a headache brought on by one too many glasses of fizzy pop the previous night, I decided to take myself off for breakfast. As is my wont I ended up at The Breakfast Club, a cafe with trendy pretensions in Soho. It may be faux scruffy chic but it does do the best fry-up in those parts and reliably so. I was delighted to see, upon my arrival, that only one couple stood between me and the counter. It did however take me ten minutes to get served. The reason for this was that said couple, well half of the couple at any rate, were ordering by the following method, "We'd like a Full Monty breakfast but can I have a bagel not bread and can I have poached eggs and can I swap the sausage for another piece of bacon and don't make the eggs too runny and can I have this yogurt smoothie but can I have banana rather than yogurt?" and on and on. The poor guy entering the order on the gizmo that tells the kitchen what to cook seemed almost at the end of his tether by the time they finished up. "She's so particular" said the, until this moment, silent party in the couple. Particular? Ye gods and little fishes that's not particular that's insane.

We are all aware, I imagine, of the idea that the customer should get what he or she wants, that the customer is right and that the role of the server and establishment is merely to serve. The idea above all that more choice is always better. But is it I ask myself? I had much opportunity to ponder this question and asked it of myself many times as I stood in line behind this prattling half-wit. No, I decided, sometimes more choice is not better.

It is not always better for several reasons. Firstly it is rude. If it takes you ten minutes to order breakfast how long must it take you to do anything important and how many hungry people must you make wait whilst you do? This is the same rudeness as those who like to order eight coffees in tiny coffee shops at rush hour, just as the queue is already stretching out of the door. It shows an astonishing level of arrogance and a total inability to behave sociably to those around you. "Do unto others" and so on.

The second reason why choice isn't always better is because you probably don't know best. When I see someone in, say an award-winning coffee shop, telling the barista that they'd like "An extra hot cappuccino with extra foam" I think ill of them. Are they seriously doing this because they know how to create a better tasting cup of coffee than someone who makes coffee for a living and who has carved out, through hard work, a serious reputation for them self? No. They do it because they are a pseud and they think it shows they are sophisticated. This is not the case. The sophisticate is the person who takes the trouble to find the best people at any given task and goes to them and allows them to work their magic. To return to Saturday's example, I appreciate that a basic fry-up is not an extravagant work of gastronomic sophistication but it is easy to screw up, it is a dish that requires balance to work well, and some pimply trustafarian with a whole host of imagined allergies and intolerances which are actually just fey fickleness does not know better than a battle hardened short order cook how best this might be achieved. In short it is insulting to crafts-people. In even shorter short, why do these people keep finding the few remaining places where there are people who care about how things should be done and then mock these good people with their imbecility?

If you want to choose from 87000 possible coffee combinations to make your soya moccha frappuccino individual then Starbucks would seem to be ideal and their billboards now advertise this feature of their operation. If, on the other hand, you would rather have a good cup of coffee then ask a barista in a proper coffee shop to make you a cappuccino or latte or flat white and let them do their magic.

And don't, for Christ's sake, take ten minutes over it.

VFX Artist T Shirt

VFX Artist T Shirt, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

After having a grumble with other VFX people today I decided to do us a T-shirt that sums up how we collectively as a group feel. Having read yet another review of Hellboy 2 today where the film is praised for using "real" men-in-suit effects rather than CGI and then goes on to praise scenes that are nothing other than CGI I felt the time was right for a graphic complaint. The optional tag-line I might add on the back of the shirt would read, "Ruining cinema one pixel at a time."

And Two Downers

Following on from the three lovely things of the last post, Sunday brought two not so good ones. Firstly Michael Vaughan resigned as England cricket captain following the series loss to South Africa. I have always thought he was a first rate captain even when dealing with a sub-par side and he is one of the most elegant batsmen I've seen. England will miss him and I worry that they will appoint Kevin Pietersen as the new captain which could spell disaster. Great players don't necessarily make great captains and I fear that will prove to be so should Pietersen get the nod. Boo.

Yesterday afternoon Tinseltroos and I finally went to see the insanely hyped and well-reviewed The Dark Knight. To say it didn't live up to expectation doesn't even begin to cover it. You may expect a more detailed critique when I have few spare minutes. At present I'm a bit too busy on next summer's blockbuster fodder. Boo some more.

The Gaucho Grill or An Object Lesson in How Not to Do It

Last night, as part of the ongoing "T-fest", a series of drinks and dinners my chum T is having to commemorate her imminent departure from this Sceptred Isle back across the Atlantic to the Land of the Brave, a group of us went to The Gaucho Grill, an upmarket Argentinian steak house in Piccadilly. I had been twice before, both at lunchtimes with a buddy, and both times I had eaten in the bar on the ground floor which still has pretensions to grandeur. The walls are covered in large gilt framed cow hides, the wall paper is very dark as are the floors, furnishings and tables. I think the desired effect is to make city banking types feel like they're somewhere special and perhaps a little naughty.

Last night we had a table in the main restaurant which makes the bar look tawdry. In addition to all the paraphernalia mentioned above there were large glass chandeliers and brass candle holders rounding out the overall effect of the apartment of a 1980s stockbroker who made his money trading in cattle and wished to celebrate this fact wherever possible. We were escorted to our table in a polite if not very friendly manner by one of a number of identikit generically pretty waitresses who seemed to hover in profusion without actually doing anything. They, however, would have been vastly preferable, due their bland inoffensiveness, to our actual waiter who I shall call Simon.

Simon would be difficult to age as he has spent so much time on the sunbeds that his skin has the quality of parched vellum. I will guess late 20s and leave it at that. Simon is possibly Spanish, possibly Argentinian and clearly thought, ten years ago, that he was going to make it big as a model when he came to London. He has that toned body that serves no practical use and is merely designed to serve as a fleshy coat hanger when prancing down a cat-walk. Unfortunately for Simon there are many, many much prettier, and these days far younger boys around who also want to make it big as a model, so Simon was not prancing down a runway, he was serving us dinner, in as rude and condescending a manner as he could muster. The permanently fixed rictus smile was ghastly enough but behind the eyes burned a cold loathing of everyone else that was frankly a little disturbing to behold. Had he been good at his job none of this would have mattered. Good service is an art-form. I have the utmost respect for waiting staff who are good at their job as it's bloody hard work and there is real skill to it. Sadly, whatever the knack, Simon doesn't have it.

He began by showing us the cuts of steak and telling us how we may have them cooked. This kind of thing annoys me. It is wonderful when waiters are knowledgeable and helpful if asked but I know what fillet, sirloin and rib-eye steaks look like thank you and I don't need some preening twit talking down to me as if I were five. In fairness to Simon all the staff do this, I assume it is company policy which perhaps begins to give you some idea of what kind of place The Gaucho Grill is. After this Simon really began to irritate. Firstly he insulted my friend AJ who had been chosen to pick the wine. Simon felt that the wine she had chosen wasn't of a "good enough quality" to go with the steak. Two things: one, if the wine is not good enough to go with steak, what is it doing on the wine list of a steak restaurant? Second, let's not kid ourselves, what he was actually saying was "I would like you to choose a more expensive wine so I make more money out of the compulsory service charge". This angered me immensely as it is rude, shows ignorance and tells you yet more about The Gaucho Grill's modus operandi. He followed up this exercise in charm and manners by asking at what temperature I would like my steak. I arched an eyebrow in confusion. Temperature? Well I'd like it cooked over a very high temperature and then have it served at a warm temperature. He clearly thought that you cook a blue steak by cooking it for the same amount of time as a well done steak but at a much lower temperature. Jesus H Christ. This really made me roll my eyes. Thankfully, aside from Simon's inability to get our order right, which we discovered when the side dishes arrived, that was his final contribution to spoiling my evening.

Onto the food. The food is expensive; a piece of steak is twenty quid. That's just for the meat; side dishes are extra, quite a lot extra in fact. I ordered grilled vegetables as my side order, priced at seven pounds and fifty pence. For nearly a tenner you get one slice of anonymous tasting aubergine, two slices of courgette, one piece of pepper and two fingers of out of season tasteless asparagus. These vegetables, I assume in order to save time in cooking, had clearly been boiled first and then just given thirty seconds on the grill at the end before being dumped on a plate. They were all bland and lacked flavour or texture. The steak itself was served medium rare. I opted for sirloin because it should be more flavoursome but was told I couldn't have it rare because the fat down the sides needed to be cooked to medium rare at minimum to be properly done. I could have pointed out that in places where they care about such things you cook the steak by holding it in a pair of tongs sideways so just the fat is touching the pan for a minute to cook it, then you can do the meat itself to whatever degree you like. But that takes effort and The Gaucho Grill doesn't do effort, it does lazy and rude indifference. My steak would have been fine had I bought it from a super market and it had cost about six quid. For more than three times the price I expected a lot better. My colleague who had fillet steak, of which I had a little taste, fared much better than I, for his steak was pretty good. However in a steak house, and especially one that takes itself as seriously as The Gaucho Grill clearly does I expect very good steak every time. Oh, and The Gaucho Grill doesn't even give you a steak knife to eat with. You have to hack your way through your disappointing meal with a regular dining knife.

Puddings were uninspired. Amongst the nonsense you could choose was a "carpaccio of fruit", I kid you not. All this was of course were a few thinly sliced pieces of raw fruit. Here, actually, is the dish which best sums up the restaurant and its attitude toward, and expectations of, its customers. "Carpaccio of fruit": let's take this apart. First can you have a carpaccio of fruit? No. Carpaccio is thinly sliced raw beef or tuna and it got its name from the Italian painter, Vittore Carpaccio, who was noted for his use of bloody red pigments in his paintings. The very etymology of the name itself implies rawness and blood, most emphatically not a couple of slices of apple. So it's an oxymoron and an oxymoron from an establishment whose sole aim, one would think, would be to understand at the deepest level the blood and the rawness: the very essence of the steak experience. Roland Barthes' essay, "Steak and Chips" in his book Mythologies takes pages to dismantle and analyse the deep relationship between us and steak, how we claim the strength of the bull from eating it, the ceremony of its acquisition, its preparation and its ingestion. Steak is a profoundly symbolic food with a massive history and mythology that gets right to the core of the human hunter gatherer turned sophisticated farmer turned connoisseur experience...

"Carpaccio of fruit".

That's what this place thinks of its customers. It sounds posh and fancy but it's a nonsense, a plain, poorly executed dish that has ideas and pretensions far beyond what it can deliver.

My pudding was an ordinary chocolate mousse cake served on a base of something that had the consistency of shoe insole and tasted little better. I paid forty five pounds for all this, including a compulsory service charge for some of the rudest and most ignorant service I have ever received. I haven't been so angry at a restaurant since this experience nearly three years back.

Bitching Dr Beeching

Here's a photo that sums up how well the railways were working this weekend

As was trailed in our last thrilling installment of The Renaissance Monkey, our hero was about to go and get trolleyed with work colleagues to celebrate the departure of a certain Red Demon thingy after which he was to jump on a train North to see his mother for her birthday. One of these exercises went well.

I was very restrained knowing I had to be up early the following morning and the thought of dealing with my mum with a raging hangover didn't bear contemplating. At a little after 10 I called it quits and went home to pack a few things and then to bed. Tinseltroos didn't rock in until much later but she was allowed the hangover as she wasn't coming with me. Duly on Saturday morning I set forth in the medium drizzle to London Euston where I arrived at 8.30. Normal procedure travelling to my mum's is get on a train at Euston, travel for an hour and forty five minutes, get off the train at Crewe. Done. A cursory examination of the internet before travelling revealed that due to the inevitable "planned engineering works" my journey would be somewhat circuitous. I boarded a train at Euston, an hour later we rolled into Northampton where we were all thrown off and driven, rather in the manner of prairie cattle, into 'buses to drive to Birmingham. Sisoftroos maintains, and I think she may be right, that the three most terrifying words in the English language are "replacement 'bus service". We trundled up the M6, stop starting in the traffic for an hour and a half until we arrived at Birmingham International.

Upon arrival there it took a little detective work to find where the suburban trains into the city of Birmingham ran from but eventually I fought my way onto a platform full of grumpy shoppers and then squeezed myself and my bag onto a tiny, packed commuter train which stopped at every tiny station in every suburb of Birmingham until we finally arrived at Birmingham New Street.

I stomped the length of the gargantuan New Street concourse looking for trains that stopped at Crewe. After several false leads and bum steers I tracked one down and boarded. From New Street we made reasonable time and I eventually arrived in Crewe, starving and parched at about 2 o'clock, five hours after I'd set out.

My mum had a fun time, I took her out to dinner and she took me to the arts fair in the town she lives in (highlights included me, trapped in a church full of singing primary school children surrounded by some horrible paintings by "local artists", with no way of escape) and then on Sunday morning at a very early hour I was out back on a train as my mother had church duties and so needed to be rid of me. The journey back was more straightforward - no changes were necessary. Unfortunately due to more engineering work and some jammed points we sat outside Milton Keynes for an hour and eventually pulled into Euston an hour and half late. A two and a half hour journey became a four hour journey.

Having dumped my bags Tinseltroos (who had just about recovered from her hang over if not her cold) and I went and had a late lunch in my favourite restaurant. From that point on the weekend took a marked turn for the better and today I'm back in work for more fun and games.

Champions

British Gas have smashed their own Appalling Service World Record in a dazzling display of incompetence the like of which has not been seen since Thomas Farriner, a Pudding Lane baker in 1666 said, "Oh I'll just pop out for 5 minutes; I'm sure those buns will be fine". Many commentators felt that their engineer breaking the boiler he was meant to be servicing had raised uselessness to a level unobtainable by the competition. Surely the only people who could raise their game to challenge that would be British Gas themselves. And so they did. Having left us without heating and scarcely any hot water for 3 weeks we finally managed to get them to commit to today as the day that they would fix that which they broke. We checked yesterday that the parts were in and an engineer was primed and ready to install them. We were informed that this was indeed the case.

So this morning Tinseltroos waited in the flat from 8 a.m. until 10.30 and I took over after that. We were solemnly promised an engineer would arrive between 8 and 1 o'clock. Surely a new world record couldn't be in the offing, could it? Oh it could. And how. The non-arrival of the engineer at any point during the 5 hour window had me reaching for the telephone to inform a British Gas sales rep of their achievement. He was surprised no-one had called he told me, it was all there in black and white. This was true I agreed although it didn't mitigate his actual non-appearance. The best he could do for me, he said in solemn tones, was to get the "parts department" to call me "immediately" to arrange another appointment. With this he hung up. Did the parts department call? Of course not. I suspect they don't actually exist. By this time I was back in work and Tinseltroos 'phoned them again and shouted at them until they agreed to send an engineer on Friday, "between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m.".

Why do I have this strange prickle of déjà vu creeping down my spine?

British Gas Must Die

You'll recall the fun and games we've had with these people in the past. We have now moved to another company to supply our gas and finally, we naively thought, we were free of their lethargic incompetence. Any firm that calls you up to try and persuade you to stay with them as a supplier and manages to get your name wrong for the entirety of the conversation does not deserve to survive. Sadly, it appears that our land-lord has a deal with British Gas to service the boiler in our flat.

Tinseltroos took a day off work yesterday so an engineer could come and service the boiler. He didn't actually "service" it, he more "broke" it, so we now have no heating and must rely on the immersion heater for water, which involves remembering to turn it on an hour before you want any hot water and costs a fortune. The engineer promised to return this morning and repair the damage. He hasn't. British Gas have contacted our land-lord and say they will try and return in a week when they have the required part. Looking at the weather forecast it will be freezing every night this week and we have no heating at all. I am speechless with anger.

Just in case we forget, British Gas only made half a billion pounds in profit for the first six months of this year (£533m to be precise). Apparently this is nowhere near enough to maintain an inventory of boiler parts so that mistakes made by their cack-handed employees can be remedied quickly.

Buttle, Not Tuttle

Our wonderful gas supplier has just sent me a bill for fifty three pence (about a dollar). The cost of postage alone is practically that even before we get to stationery and printing costs. Ye Gods, either waive it or put it on the next proper bill. The question now is should I write a cheque for the amount and make the bastards go through the agro of cashing it?

Les Misérables - a short review

Saw this musical for the first time tonight. Here's its report card:

Story - C
Music - C-
Libretto - FAIL
Cast - C-
Set - B
Costume - C
Audience - FAIL

Overall - Semi-skimmed melodrama.

Spiral of Despair

And downwards and ever backwards into the ever deepening pit of no-telephone despair. Once again Tinseltroos and I have spent the better part of a day taking turns waiting for a BT engineer to turn up. Having begun our ordeal at 8.00 a.m. with Tinseltroos holding the fort it was a big no-show. I took over at 10.30 and sat, twiddling my thumbs, as the morning ebbed away. I received a classically impersonal SMSBT were "sorry" (how sorry a machine can be is somewhat moot) and that all their engineers were running late. This I had noticed given the presence of no engineers in the flat. He finally arrived at 2.30, which BT, is not "in the morning" i.e. when you claimed that he would arrive. I had to leave to come back to work and left Tinseltroos, who'd come racing back, to deal with the unfolding situation. Please can we have a phone line now? It's been over 6 weeks and I begin to give up hope that I will ever surf the web at home. Once again, apologies for the lightness of posting but I can only write this stuff whilst waiting for renders or sims at work. At present I'm simulating pouring boulders into a large statue shaped mould for a film due out next year sometime. There aren't that many people who could claim that today I'd wager.

UPDATE:

Tinseltroos has just phoned from our new B.T. land-line. Right, now to try and organise some broadband from, surprisingly enough, another supplier than B.T. Mr. Atrocity heaves a heavy sigh and trudges off to argue the futility of existence with another service "provider".

Tuttle Not Buttle

Right so the electricity meter isn't in the embassy, it's the other next door. The company that occupied the bottom two floors of that building has now vacated the premises so the key to the meter cupboard currently resides with a recruitment agency on the second floor. And they won't give us the key; they don't think they're allowed to. We have to go back on Thursday when Samantha will be in and ask her. She may think differently.

This is achieving a level of bureaucratic insanity I did not believe possible. I've obviously been working with motivated competent people for far too long and had forgotten about the majority of lazy jobsworths whose sole desire in life is to make sure their own arses are so completely covered that they can never appear to be responsible for anything. They generally achieve this by inaction and continual buck-passing. It is slowly driving me mad. It's a bit like those puzzles in Zelda where you have to get an item that allows you to do a thing so you can talk to the wizard who, in return for another thing, will give you a doodad so you can finally take a fucking electricity reading.

The saga continues...

Grumble

I'm too angry to write much now. I took half a day of my very limited and precious annual leave in order to have a phone line put in only for me not have a phone line put in. Now I need to chase up a whole bunch of other people to get access to various cupboards and then go through the torture of contacting BT again. It's taken three weeks to have nothing at all happen. Argh!

Metamorphosis

I hate bureaucracy. I hate its glacial slowness. I hate its unbending certainty. I hate its crushing ineptitude and I hate its ability to suck the joy and merriment out of your life.

After moving into Schossadlerflug we've been wanting to get a phone line installed mostly so it can have broadband and we can play on the interwebs. Wondering why posting has been so light? Now you have your answer. I'm writing this at the studio between renders on the three projects I seem to be working concurrently on.

Ten days ago I used the surprisingly efficient online ordering system at www.bt.com to order a new line to be put into the flat. Let's not forget, that isn't the internet, this is just a phone line so we can then order the internet. For eight days I hear nothing, though they do seem to have gratefully accepted a hundred and twenty quid of my money for this inactivity. On Tuesday I returned from a meeting to discover an answerphone message on my mobile from someone at BT to inform me that they were trying to contact me to discuss my order. They didn't allude what they wished to talk about but they did give me a number to call. So call it I did. I waited for twenty minutes until the call was answered. It then took another half hour for the friendly but clueless operator to work out that he couldn't help me and I was given another number which, I was assured, had someone on the other end who would be able to tell me what was going on.

Undaunted by my hour long phone-call with nothing to show I dialled again. And I waited and then waited some more. I waited for forty minutes as the dialling tone was periodically interrupted by a robot to tell me that their lines were very busy at the moment, for which the soulless machine was very sorry, and that my call would be answered as soon as possible. I gave up and decided to call later. I phoned again at 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. and again my call went unanswered for forty minutes each time. My mood darkened and yet I would not give up just yet. So this morning I got into work at 8 a.m. sharp and dialled one more time. I waited for an hour and yet there was still no response other than the robot telling me how busy they still were so I screamed at the injustice of the world and gave up. Though I've ordered my line online, I can't check its progress online as BT's order-tracking works by you telling it the phone number of the line you wish to query - which I don't have yet. And I can't telephone the telephone company to either check on progress or cancel my damn order because they refuse to answer the bloody thing.

I might not expect BT to be terribly good at paper-work or to have a sparkling online presence but I do expect the premier telephone company to be able to run a call centre and answer the damn device they seem determined not to supply me with. This whole affair is taking on Kafka-ian proportions now, "One morning Gregor Atrocity awoke to discover he'd been turned into a gigantic BT sales agent." One might imagine that if customers of a major telecommunications provider have to wait for longer than an hour to get any service, for which they have paid, the company would hire more people for their call centre. Sadly BT only made £6 billion in profits last year so a few more telephone operators would probably put too much of a strain on resources.

When Will It Ever End?

This goddamn project refuses to die. I'm still toiling away on it (though I only worked Saturday last weekend) but this is all getting too much really. We've all had enough and to be honest maintaining any sense of interest or motivation is proving very very difficult now.

The other odd aspect to reviewing the shots as they slowly, one by one, achieve final status and leave the building is that whatever show you work on, however long you spend, it tends to break down to 20% of the shots look great, 60% look OK and 20% are stinkers whatever you do. I'm sure a lot of it must be to do with our own myopia on the project and that others may see things differently but nonetheless that weighting just keeps coming around. I am so sick of this film now I can scarcely think about it without wanting to hit something. I shall be working the Easter weekend and bank holidays in order to get this morning's list of changes finished. You have to love show business sometimes.

Pants.

son of a bitch.

Social Pariah

I have a new enemy. I do not know his or her name, but I have come across many minions. My hatred is directed toward the evil bastard who designed the new Sony Ericsson Walkman phone. "I *crappy Sony Ericsson logo* music" says the ad. Really? Is that so? What I want to know is what kind of sick mind thinks that putting a small, wretchedly bad quality speaker into a mobile phone and then connecting that up to its MP3 play is a good idea? It's a hateful idea, and it's clearly a conscious one. All phones must have a speaker, I understand that, they must also be tiny and thus poor quality. It is bad enough that we have to listen to ring-tones which loudly announce the owner's wacky personality everytime one of their asinine friends feels the need to speak to them, it is quite another to give these cretins the ability to play their dull, formulaic music in a loud but completely lo-fi manner during the few moments of respite we used to get between calls.

Riding on buses has become a nightmare. Who thought this was a good idea? How can the designers have seen this as anything other than carte blanche for these dull people, with dull personalities and duller taste in music to try and force us to believe that they are individuals worth listening to because their phone can broadcast their fascinatingly diverse musical library to all and sundry? It fascinates me that you never see the truly "different" or "edgy" people behave like this, the ones whose musical taste might be a little left of centre and might be actually interesting or stimulating to hear. Ever since these phones came out all I have heard is generic R 'n' B and chart music being played by anonymous latter-day Charles and Charlotte Pooters as they go about their McLives. That these people think it's an OK way to behave is bad, but most of them are probably too dumb to know any better. The person who should have known better is the designer who made this situation possible. Sir or madam, when I find you, you are in seven different shades of shit.

My Day at Work Can Best Be Summed Up By This Cartoon I Drew

Carrot and Stick, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Rocket Assistance

Rocket Salad, originally uploaded by Philosopher Queen.

Perhaps it's just in the trendier, more metropolitan areas, but I can't help but notice that were are overrun by a green menace. It seems impossible to order a salad, a burger, a pasta dish or even a pizza without the whole thing being smothered in rocket. In moderation it's perfectly fine and harmless; it's slightly peppery, slightly soapy flavour can even be a welcome addition to a dish but the tendency seems to be to bury your food under a layer of the stuff, regardless of whether it's appropriate or not.

When I order a burger I know what I'm doing. I am saying, in no uncertain terms, that I require fat, starch, salt and more fat and I am wanting them now and in concentration. Burger eaters are not prissy, we do not care, in that instant, what the calorific horror of what we are doing means and we sure as hell do not require the object of our desire to be buried, as if to hide it from enemy aircraft, under this blanket of leaves. To be honest it spoils the fun. I know what I want and I do not wish some mealy mouthed dietitian to jazz up my simple pleasures under the guise of a consession to health, or gods forbid, style. It's a burger godammit, leave it alone, it was just fine without the rabbit food.