Miscellaneous things that annoy me

I thought I’d complain some more, because I’m annoyed by more than just shoes and grammar.

• Hands-free phone headsets (unless you’re in a car, in which case it’s annoying if you’re not using one, not to mention illegal). It just bothers me seeing people walking round talking to themselves. I am particularly annoyed by those bluetooth ones that you stick over your ear. They’re like a little futuristic sign saying “I’m a cock.” Also, if you are wearing one of them and not on the phone, you are doubly cock-ish.
• Top Gear using DJ Shadow and the Fight Club soundtrack as background music. Stop comandeering good if fairly obscure music snippets for your televisual midlife crisis!
• George Lamb. Go away silly man. I have to actually get out of bed to turn off my radio when Shaun Keaveny’s show finishes at 10. So I suppose that’s a good thing. I don’t even know where to begin with Monsieur Lamb. Everything about his show irritates me.
• If I can see your boxers, you are a twat.
• The longer it takes to you to order a coffee the more of a twat you are. “Double Espresso” fine. (Incidentally, if you say “expresso” I don’t like you.) “Large Filter Coffee” no problem. “Latte” Alright. “Decaf Semi-Skimmed Goat’s Milk Mocha-choco-frappe-twatto-soya-latte” You are a twat.
• Those wheely suitcases. But only small ones. I have a big wheely-bag and it is great for carrying lots of stuff around (unless stairs are involved). My issue is with the really small ones, like laptop case sized. PICK THE DAMN THING UP YOU LAZY MAGGOT. If the handle you hold the bag by when wheeling it is longer than the bag is tall, you are a lazy bastard. Also, when you change direction, the people directly behind you to the side are likely to be tripped up by your cretin-bag. And of course, because you’re wheeling a bag around, you are likely to be moving slower than I am. Which is also annoying. Those wheely bags are designed to make it easier to carry around large heavy bags. The little ones can’t possibly be carrying enough that you couldn’t pick it up and carry it, or at least get a shoulder strap. Trailing your laptop or whatever behind you like that is just obnoxious. I hope someone steals your computer and uses your credit cards and sends rude emails to your family with it.

And in other news, I was made aware of another stupid holiday. I like this one. Pretend to be a Time Traveller day.

Shoes that annoy me

Happy Pi approximation day! It’s 22/7, geddit? Here is some history of pi.

On an unrelated note, here are some types of footwear that annoy me more than footwear should.

• Crocs. Who cares if they’ve been designed to be 62.6% better than standing barefoot? They look really really silly.
  

  Crocs annoy me

• Sandals with socks. Why would you do this? What goes through your mind? “Hmm, it’s warm enough for sandals today… But I’ll put some socks on in case my feet get cold.”
  

  Sad sad sad.

• Converse. I don’t really know why this one annoys me so much. But it does.
  

  Who'd have thought shoes could annoy me so much

• Goth boots.  I suppose this just kind of follows from the fact I just don’t really “get” the whole goth thing. But I especially don’t understand how wearing huge boots with comically big heels fits with the whole look. What’s next? Punks on stilts?
  

  Platform shoes for the terminally moody

Right, that’s about it as far as varieties of footwear I dislike goes.

Behold the duck

Behold the duck
It does not cluck
A cluck it lacks
It quacks

-Ogden Nash

I have spent much of today failing to write anything useful about Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina so I thought I’d write something here, just to reassure myself I am still capable of stringing the odd sentence together.

I bought a new razor recently, because I couldn’t find new blades for my old one. I succumbed to the mighty advertising clout of Gillette and bought a FUSION! razor. If you live under a rock, I’ll remind you that the FUSION! line of razors is advertised by Thierry Henry, Roger Federer and Tiger Woods. I don’t know which sportsman’s total lack of personality drew me to their product. All I know is that I now command the comfort of five blades AND the precision of one. Fear me. For I have experienced the miracle of FUSION!

Adam and Joe were talking about new holidays today on their BBC 6music radio show thinger. It was rather good and stuff. I’ll link to the podcast when it shows up (around 6 tomorrow, apparently). I didn’t text in any of the genius ideas I have had in the past. But theirs were specifically new days for sending cards on. Apparently they got the idea off the Apprentice. But I haven’t seen any of it this year. Or any year, for that matter.

I watched Any Given Sunday yesterday, because I’d picked it up at Borders for £2.99. Bargain! Anyway. Yes it was worth every penny of my three pounds. I also picked up The Talented Mr Ripley, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and… some other film. All going for a song. Marvelous.

St. Patricks day! Also, atheism

Today we celebrate the day St Patrick turned all the snake in Ireland into Guinness. Or something like that. Don’t let the church tell you St Paddy’s isn’t today. Just because it’s their holiday, doesn’t mean they can move it about…

Speaking of the church (Good link, good link…) here are some random thoughts on atheism. So the scientific atheist position seems roughly to be the following:

• You can explain everything with science.
• Specifically, you can explain religion by talking about memes, evolution and other such things.
• This is the best explanation of religion.
• The best explanation of religion doesn’t appeal to God.
• So shave the big man upstairs with Occam’s razor.

I think there is a subtlety in the Occam’s razor step that is often overlooked: this is a scientific explanation. It is good science not to believe in the existence of entities your theory doesn’t need. I think this scientific aspect of the Occam step is important.

So, what criticisms can we make of this? I think the Big One is the idea that we should be explaining religion with science. If you concede that, then you’re pretty much finished. But roughly speaking I agree with the argument. I just don’t quite feel pushes me all the way to outright denial of the existence of any deity. So I’d say I’m intuitively atheist, but philosophically agnostic.

I don’t really have a proper point.

TVlicensing say I’m a criminal, and why I don’t give money to greenpeace

I object to the accusatory letter the TV licensing authority people send me. My room is too small to comfortably house a television, and I really don’t need more distractions anyway. I’d be more than happy to pay a significantly reduced license for my use of BBC radio and the BBC website, but that isn’t on offer. And the fact that TVlicensing think I’m a criminal means I’m less inclined to even that reasonable idea… Today I got a “Things you need to know in case of prosecution” notice. It starts:

According to our database, your address remains unlicensed for you to use TV receiving equipment there, despite several requests for payment of your TV license fee.

Nowhere does it suggest that anyone has even considered the possibility I do not have a television. The only conditional statements are things like “if you are committing an offence…” or “if you are found to be breaking the law…” Nothing like “if you don’t have a TV, please disregard this notice, we apologise for the inconvenience and the insult caused by suggesting you are a criminal”

Actually, upon closer scrutiny there is some small print on the back that says if I don’t have a TV, I don’t need a TV license.

I wonder if Roger Scruton submits papers he reads to scrutony scrutiny. Heh. Oh dear… On an equally frivolous but philosophical note, this blog seems promising.

And another thing that annoys me more, the more I think about it. There are people trying to get me to give money to greenpeace. If I were going to give money to charity, greenpeace wouldn’t be the one I’d choose. First, green issues and ethical issues are in the news so much that it steals a lot of greenpeace’s thunder. Everyone is pretty much aware of the problem now. So I don’t feel obliged to give money to greenpeace so that they can “raise public awareness.” Second, I don’t want my money being spent on stupid things like sabotaging Japan’s whaling fleet. That’s not to say that I condone Japan’s actions, I simply don’t want to fund criminal activity, no matter how well meaning. Incidentally I think there are better ways to get Japan to stop whaling; encouraging Japan to fund more conservation efforts, encouraging less invasive “science” methods (let’s not forget Japan claims their whaling is for scientific purposes), publicising the extent of the whaling and its damage to the environment and so on. The Arctic Sunrise‘s actions are petty and unhelpful in this arena.

So I’d rather give money to charities distributing leprosy treatments in poor countries or even to some research charity like cancer research UK or something.

Oh, and happy Pi Day!

I cannot spell the word license. Every time I typed it I had to look to see whether I’d got it right. I’ve been spelling it “lisence” loads. I wonder why that is. I have trouble with “exercise” too. I blame French.

Oh and one final thing, Donald Knuth’s Surreal Numbers should have been mentioned when I was talking about dialogues.

Lent!

Here is a list of things I have given up for lent (This list is not exhaustive):

• Going to the Ikea cafe
• Darts
• Faster than light travel
• Eye make-up
• Eating the hearts of my enemies
• Reciting Jabberwocky backwards in front of a mirror at midnight during an eclipse
• Smoking
• Fencing
• Spoon-theft
• Doing the lottery
• Telekenesis
• Faith-healing
• Pretending to have conversations with Marlon Brando at seances
• Black Mass
• Using the phrase “doxastic haecceity”
• Beer

I am like 16 times a better Christian than you. Ha ha.

Happy Repeal day!

You know what we need? More excuses to go a-drinking! Well here is another one! The day the US repealed prohibition. Hoorah! Fuel the binge-drink economy! Punish your liver! Pump money into the coffers of Diageo and InBev.

I can’t decide which is worse; the government’s oddly draconian proposals on making criminals of parents who allow their children to drink the safety of their own homes or the coagulation of most of the brands sold in Britain into fewer and fewer soulless multinational conglomerates.

Whoah, mood kill. Anway… Mine’s a Guinness. Cheers.

A few of my favourite things

Haiku Circus is
My new favourite website
It makes me chuckle

Peep Show and Have I Got News For You were both funny. But not in that order. Peep Show was on after HIGNFY was. Anyway. I might be out tomorrow and miss all the campy goodness of Eurovision. That would be a crying shame. I’ll have to trawl YouTube for the highlights.

I found a googlewhack today. I think it was “groupoidification periphery” Although by writing about it here it will probably cease to be a Googlewhack. Still, groupoidification is my favourite word today. It will probably be word of the week…

Another “favourite” of mine is today’s favourite fact; Tony Blair dated Mary Harron who went on to direct American Psycho. Now that is a pretty awesome fact.

Here are a couple more pointless holiday ideas!

• Only reply to direct questions day
• Respond in a different medium to the one you were addressed in day (So ring up to answer emails, write down the answer to verbally asked questions etc…)
• Finish every sentence with the word “underpants” day underpants
• Blink as little as possible day
• Wink at strangers day
• Speak only in internet memes day (So basically all you can do is ask for cheeseburgers, inform people as to the state of their base, what you’re doing to their dudes and tell people how it is in Soviet Russia)
• Walk like an Egyptian day

OK, that’s enough.

Snooker Loopy

Well done John Higgins, the new snooker world champion! Well done Mark Selby as well. The last few frames of the final were great. I didn’t see much of the earlier sessions of the final, though they sounded pretty one sided one way or the other.

I thought of another holiday; Narrate your own life day.

Happy “Early May Bank Holiday”

My Farside calendar is telling me that today is “Early May Bank Holiday” and I was thinking that that is a stupid holiday. (It should be called “stay at home and watch the snooker world championships final on BBC2 day”) Bank Holidays are stupid. What’s the point? You get a day off work and everything is shut. Great. They should stagger these holidays; banks get Monday off, supermarkets get Tuesday and so on. That means that on any one day, most stuff will be open and everyone gets a day off. Hooray! Then I thought that every day should be something special on the calendar. Like tomorrow. Tomorrow is just the 8th of May. Tuesday. Nothing special. Poor little eighth of May. So I started thinking up new holidays to sprinkle on the little “nothing” days, in the vein of Talk like a pirate day and Steak and a blowjob day I have thought up some other holidays;

• Give everyone you meet a 13amp fuse day
• Greet people with an annoyingly loud yelp day
• Eat nothing but carrots day
• Speak only in sentences with a prime number of words in them day
• Wear something purple for me day
• Speak only in song lyrics days
• Speak only in film quotes day
• Dress like a wurzel day
• Physically abuse a 4×4 driver day
• Set alight to a smoker day (July 1st)
• International “not a holiday” day

OK, so some of these aren’t as snappy as “Christmas” or “Easter” but whatever.

On a lighter note, the golden mean is 1+(1/ 1+(1/ 1+(1/ 1+(1/ 1+(1/ 1+(1/ 1+(1/ …