Telling it like it is

I swear to God I'm a complete retard when it comes to using the imperial system. Why people can't use metric is a mystery to me. It's what's taught in all the schools now. Bloody imperial tape measures and straightedges meant it took me four (yes, four ) attempts to hang a mirror today. What the bloody hell is 7/64 ? Or 3/8? The problem was that I was looking at an imperial ruler but mentally registering the divisions in between the inches in tenths - like metric. Of course in imperial those little marks are at 1/8 and 1/16 of an inch, not 1/10. At least the three pairs of wrong holes are covered up by the mirror. :-(

Armin Van Buuren has struck a deal to have his State Of Trance show broadcast on XM Satellite radio! If I couldn't get the downloads each week, I'd be down to BestBuy and picking up an XM system for that alone......

Another outbreak of Bird flu hits Asia! Absolutely nobody infected and zero people dead! PANIC! Of course 10,000 Americans die each year of the regular flu, compared to - what - 62 people on the entire planet who've died of avian flu this year? Yeah, panic. That'll do you good.

This whole political correctness thing has to stop, right now. Lambeth council, in south London, has started advertising it's Christmas lights festivities as "Winter Lights" and "Celebration Lights" for fear of offending other faiths. No. Just stop it. It's not "seasonal festivities", it's not "winter celebration", it's not "december festival". The goddamn word is Christmas. If you're going to get all PC and stop calling it Christmas, then you should also get equally politically correct about some other festivities: Ramadan needs to be renamed "The voluntary fasting of that other faith". Hannukah needs to be renamed "The eight-day feast of the Jews". See how stupid that looks? Good. F*ck the other faiths. We don't have problems with them using their holiday names, so if they're the ones who have a problem with the word "Christmas" then they're the ones that can f*ck off back...

I've always fancied myself as a helicopter pilot. Part of the grand plan when we moved to America was to save up some cash and find a training school. Problem was that the nearest one turned out to be over 800 miles away. But now we've got a new helicopter training school (Upper Limit Aviation) at Salt Lake City airport. I gave them a call today and I'm going on a check ride on thursday evening to see if I have the aptitude to pilot a helicopter....

I learned today that the government back in England is launching a citizenship test for foreigners who want to become British. If you want the passport, then you'll have to read a book entitled "Life in the UK", and you'll have to sit a 45-minute test on society, history and culture based on the contents of that book. Apart from this being yet another way Blair is turning England into the next US State, the content of the book is dangerously skewed. Life in the UK says that to be British you should Respect laws, the elected political structures, traditional values of mutual tolerance and respect for rights and mutual concern. Nice idea but the sentiment would be that much more valuable if the political structures weren't all corrupt and if they government had any mutual concern for its citizens. Life in the UK tells you that (seriously) if you spill someone's pint in a pub, you should offer to buy them another. It makes no mention of the fact that you'll ...

I've noticed a change in the behaviour of one of the higher-ups in the company in the last couple of weeks. For 4 years he's always parked his shiny car in the same parking space, way the heck away from everyone else in the company. For the last 7 or 8 days, he's been parking in with the peons. I can't figure out why. In other news, it is incredibly difficult to cancel a credit card over here. I just tried cancelling one of my Amex cards and after the 35 minutes on hold, I got the hard sell from "Gabe" who told me I was a valued customer and they could waive the fee for the next year and so on and so forth. They couldn't accept that I simply didn't need the card any more. I'm actually not sure it's been cancelled - we got to the point where I convinced him to cancel the account and he just cut me off. Their attitude was enough to dissuade me from any offers they could throw my way to keep the card. The longer I stayed on the phone with him, t...

Two buckets of paint, both white on the outside, both with a dab of colour on the lid. One is a shade darker than the other, but the bucket is under the lightbulb in the storage hole. Mix that one up, slap it on the wall. Mmm. Looks a bit dark but I'm sure it'll lighten up as it dries. Or not. Back to the storage hole and out with the second bucket. Ah. So that's why it's drying to be a different colour. The actual colour I want is in the other bucket which was in the shadow and looked darker. Bollocks. Hope the light colour is thick enough to cover up the dark colour.