Nothing

Lungs like toast.

Tight cough with a sore throat.

Head, on the verge of exploding through unprecedented internal sinus pressure.

Still, we men don't like to complain about our illnesses.... we just quietly go about our daily lives and continue to fulfil our roles in society as best we can.

And so it comes to be, that despite all common sense, I'm heading down to the pub for a short, sharp four hour stint at the coalface of refreshment provision.

I dare say that nobody will even notice I'm ill nor ask me how I am feeling, so well do I cope with such adversity.

What a trooper I am!

Harebell amongst the sand dunes

Groans

I've got a tickly throat... in fact I've had this annoying, steadily increasingly annoying, tickly throat for a week now and it's JUST starting to get the better of me..... Strepsils and Beechams Powders at the ready.

(hot toddy made with rum and I'm off to bed)

I've just been reminded of a story.... reminded by my own inability to spot a joke when it slaps me across my dumbfounded face.

Well, as a kid, I was a real gag machine.... a veritable joke magnet.  I was always buying, digesting and regurgitating joke books.  I had a good memory for jokes and I'm sorry to say that my ability to spin a yarn or remember any funny jokes really has deserted me as I get older.

A few that I do remember are the silly childish ones like.....

Shall I tell you the joke about the pack of butter?  Oh no, you'll only spread it.

Want to hear the joke about the wheelie bin?  Oh no, it's rubbish.

Shall I tell you the joke about the broken pencil?  Oh no, there's no point.

you get the idea, right?

Well, there was a kid at our school, and to protect his identity, I'll just refer to him as "Ian"..... he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer and as kids do, we royally took the piss.

Well Ian always liked to hear a joke.... and it was a fair certainty that he'd laugh at any joke you told him, whether he understood it, or got it, or not.

In order to test this particular theory... someone, and I forget who, came up with a nonsensical joke to tell to Ian and see if he laughed.......

I can confirm that Ian did indeed laugh, and the joke was not in the least bit funny......  Sadly, I still remember the nonsense joke, and it does make me laugh.....

A boy walks into a baker's shop and asks "Have you got a blue loaf please?"  The baker replies "I'm sorry we've only got green loaves left" and the boy says "It's ok I've got my bike outside".

HAHAHAHA who's laughing now Mr. Haigh.... oops!

When no news isn't....

No news isn't necessarily good news.... but it's news nonetheless!  Or is it?

Ok so it's my usual Sunday cop out searches!

zarch archimede download

"Ere Wevz have you played Zarch on the Archimedes?"

"Ave I f@%£k"

So goes the infamous story of how a friend introduced me to a game that is largely, to the best of my recollection, a sort of version of Virus on the Atari ST, which I actually HAD played and would have illicited a much more friendly response.  So you want a rom of Zarch for the Archimedes do you?  Well look no further!  #in fairness it's a really difficult game to track down and I think this is largely down to the fact that the Archimedes has been relatively impossible to emulate??

artctic fox blog

Usually someone misses out the "C" in arCtic fox and spells it thusly.... "artic".... and THAT makes me angry, and you wouldn't like me when I'm angry!  In this instance, notable only by the fact that I've never seen this particular mistake in my search criteria before.... they've added an extra "T".... well, it's a new one on me... and rather strangely, despite the odd spelling, I do rank number one in Google's list given that particular search!!  So, rather than have to point someone in the right direction..... you've actually, despite your poor spelling, found the right place.... well done.... sort of!

 

white phase arctic fox

Blue in summer; White in winter.... that's the Arctic fox way of life.... it's all about the camouflage innit!

folk off 

Same to you with knobs on!

jimi hendrix long hair

Yes he did. So did Noel Redding!!

Salty slug racing on a boring rainy afternoon!  come on lane 2!!!!

Perhaps....

Watching the rain streaming down the windows in my lounge and the distorted image behind it.....

Harry Potter's later years in Lego Hogwarts, and my deftly flicking wand wiimote that conjures the "cruciatus curse" resulting in a cascade of multicoloured virtual bricks......

Playing gin rummy against a great-grandma from Georgia with Oklahoma rules in force......

Destroying my brain with a daily double dose of Big Brother entertainment shows.......

Car, half packed, ready for a fishing trip that has yet to materialise, weather too wet and too windy to make the effort......

Not one of these things makes for an interesting blog.... or at least I should say, not one of these things makes for an interesting blog Or a blog that I haven't written before!

In truth, I'm feeling far too flat and far too demotivated to summon up the energy.

Here's a link to the planning application for the destruction of Cupwith Reservoir - there's a prize for the first person who makes it through the "documents" section without falling asleep, and there's an additional award for the first person that can actually find out a valid reason for the reservoir being drained!

See: Previous blog about Cupwith & My Flickr Cupwith pictures.

Saturated....

It's just another rainy Sunday.... warm, but boy, is it wet?

Went out walking yesterday and the weather was decidedly "muggy" so I'm quite glad that this rain will be clearing the air.  It started raining towards the end of our "abbreviated" walk, and it's been raining since....  the bowling green out back is completely waterlogged.... the golf course, through which I have just besoddenly dragged a god dog was in danger of capsizing.

Bad day for outdoor sporting it would seem!

So, it's left to me to provide you all with a bit of an alternative to jubilee celebratory activity overloading yourselves, and I choose to do this by bringing to you (insert fanfare).....

Search Engine Sunday.......

to whistle

I'm making a massive assumption in this response, but..... You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.

arctic fox diagram of the ear

Surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be a decent diagram of an Arctic fox's ear.... anywhere in the known puniverse.... so for the benefit of science, I've taken it upon myself to create one for everyone to be able to refer back to, and here it is:

harry hill trombone solos

Oh, this old chestnut.....I used to own quite a few really good tunes with Harry Hill trombone solos in them, let me see if I can't find them.... (you have to pause, looking at this sentence for at least fifteen minutes to emulate the "real-time" aspect of me going off searching my library of files)...... (ok files found.... wait here fifteen minutes while I find out how to embed an mp3 into my blog - at which I will undoubtedly fail and link you to the zip file containing the trombone solo mp3 files)....Click this (you'll have to download the "harry hill" file from there and unzip the mp3 files and play them for yourselves)!

kia ora crow

Let's set the scene.... you're sat in the ABC cinema and you've just watched the Disney cartoon that was the prequel to the forthcoming main event of some such film as "The Cat From Outer Space" or "The Apple Dumpling Gang" and inbetween the two films you get chance to queue up down the steps to visit a vendor of intervalistic treats.  You might visit a lady with a badly illuminated tray who is selling tubs, or in the case of one Huddersfield cinema, they had a little kiosk that only lit up in the interval and was halfway down the right hand side of the cinema embedded in the wall....  Anyway.... during said interval, there would be a few adverts playing on the screen......

One of the adverts would be the "Pearl and Dean" advert ..... pa pa pa paaa pa pa pa pa PA puh paaaa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa paaaaaaaaaAAAA YEAH!

Another such advert would begin..... "Your projectionist tonight is Eric." etc...... and went on to urge us to buy Kia Ora

Anyhoo...... the Kia Ora brand eventually spilled out of cinemas and into our supermarkets... eventually being advertised on our tellyboxes, where there was obviously no reference to our projectionist, Eric.  So they had to make up a new face for Kia Ora and it ended up as this whole sketch with some kid, some crows and a dog.... now deemed officially racist (just read the youtube diatribe that accompanies the video), but I can't imagine anybody was offended at the time.... anyway, here's a link to the crows and here's a link to Eric (lest we forget!)

top 10 biscuits 2012

Would you "Adam and Eve" it.... Someone actually came looking for biscuits!  Well you may all be aware, or not if you were too lazy to read it earlier, that indeed, I DID produce an official and legally binding "top ten" of biscuits that not only spans the year of 2012, but any other year you'd care to imagine!  Here's that very article, which is, rather imaginatively entitled "Top 10 - Biscuits" - It's the hyphen that makes it so special!

Naff off....

To quote the late, great Ronnie Barker as the ever present Norman Stanley Fletcher in Porridge.....  Naff off!

That's what I find myself saying quite a lot during these hot, sunny, summer days.  Or words to that effect at least, that possibly are too crude to be published herein.

Naff off temporary traffic lights.  There's a set just up the road from me that have been inching closer and closer to my domain over the last month or so.... at one point they were "three way" and then back to standard "straight line" or "two way" and now they've reached the end of Gosport Lane.... one of my regular short cuts, they're back to three way and the traffic backs up along Gosport.... and the traffic backs up through Outlane past my house....

Because it's sunny, when cars are stuck at traffic lights, they tend to have their windows down and their shitty stereos spewing crappy music out all over my garden, where I am inclined to be on and incline with a book clutched in one hand... pretending to read, while I am really trying to snooze!  Alternatively, I'm stuck in one of the three directions of traffic signals with the t-shirt sticking to my back.... just hundreds of metres from my home but unable to get there.

NAFF OFF!

Naff off to people who don't thank me for letting them out of a junction or to come through a narrow piece of road, flanked by the myriad of parked vehicles.

Naff off to people who, travelling downhill, with parked cars on their side, advance against me as I am travelling uphill with the technical right of way, and then fail to acknowledge that this is unreasonable and/or deserves at least some sort of recognition.

NAFF OFF

Whether it's the weather, or whether it's just technology that's railing against me but every piece of vaguely pseudo intelligent equipment I touch seems to malfunction.....  I sat waiting for my laptop to reboot tonight..... lights flashing, but undoubtedly there was nobody home.....  I waited.... Thorin sat down and started singing about gold......  Eventually, by some strange quirk of chance and or sense of frustration, I unplugged the USB hub and the laptop sprang to life.

NAFF OFF

Road tax..... car insurance.... MOT..... petrol prices......

NAFF OFF

Nosey neighbours.... bored out of their minds in their retirement.... pretending to be doing things so they can find out what's going on.... leaning over the wall....  eyeing up the missus while pretending to be planting their "summer bedding" in regimented rows around their hard-standings.......  "What's that".... "What are you doing?"...... "How does that work?"......  I don't expect to spend my day in the garden with neighbours, and their neighbours, and their neighbours and so ad infinitum.

Rant, rage, rail......  eyes bulging..... temperature rising......

Weak end!

It's the weekend, it's a bit weakened and I've got a weak end!

Story of this wet and miserable couple of days that everyone who goes to work looks forward to.

If these antibiotics would let me stray beyond the comfortable reach of a decent bathroom and/or permit me to have the customary weekend real ale experience.... then I am sure that this weather wouldn't be pissing me off as much as it is!

Even venturing out to the shops with Dawn today was like a military operation.... tablets.... alarms.... feeding time at the zoo.....  hopefully by Wednesday of this coming week things will be getting back to normal.

My alarm's just gone off to tell me I ought to be having my tea and taking a tablet but the adjustments I have to process from earlier in the day when we were out and about and the subsequent knock on effects are tying my loose noggin in knots.

Trying to download some films to watch this evening and the crappy USB stick I bought as a replacement is playing silly beggars too..... it does this stupid thing where it chops my download speed to 10kB/s and it makes me want to smash something!

To top it all off, my Nintendo 3DS has upgraded its own software and now my "special" card doesn't work in it.....   bloody technology!

Bloody weekends....

Vicious circle

Stuck in an anticyclonic tango with bad health and bad weather.

Miserable outside... miserable inside.

Not even the chance of watching a hitherto unseen movie or playing a video game could lift my dank spirits today.

More of the same antibiotics... more of the same alarm bells signalling mealtimes.....

I decided I'd fix myself a nice big pan of stew, the ultimate comfort food, but of course, when I got there the cupboards were indeed bare.  In order that this poorly dog shouldn't have none, I decided to get dressed and head on out for supplies.

I picked a suitable gap in the rain and made a dash for the car.  To my surprise, something you can never really gauge from your armchair caught me unawares, and I found it was actually quite warm outside.  Warm to the extent that the road was actually beginning to steam.

I set off in one direction, changed my mind, took a detour, got stuck in some traffic lights and ended up at a local Aldi.  Now I've nothing against Aldi, but I find that you need to prepare yourself for a visit when you decide to go there.....

a) I've got no change.... not one single coin.... no trolley and they don't have hand baskets at Aldi either.

b) No shopping bags.  Usually I carry a few bags in the car for such emergencies.  I'm a big fan of reusing bags and we have a plethora of jute and canvas bags for such occasions.  Not today though.

c) Car parking.... whenever I go to Aldi there's never a car parking space and I had to do two circuits of the car park turning round by the recycling bins at one point before I finally parked in the loading bay!

Ok so I've parked.  I can't get a trolley.  I've got no bags.

First thing on the list.... bread.  I pick up a cheap brown sliced loaf.  Then on to the fruit and veg section, picking up a tin of tomatoes on the way.

It's about this time that my lack of energy due to lack of food decides to kick in and I get that unmistakable shuddery feeling inside, which I presume is low blood sugar or something.

So, a family pack of mushrooms..... a turnip... some potatoes.... some carrots..... some onions.....  by now the loaf is getting slightly squashed......  I put the turnip in my jacket pocket, like some weird shoplifter and carry on..... to the till..... feeling like I could faint for lack of nourishment at any given moment.

It's turning into a weird episode of Double or Drop (if anyone's old enough to remember that Crackerjack classic?).

To add insult to my injury in this unpleasant shopping experience.... I have to pay three pence for a carrier bag.  On the plus side, I DO remember to take the turnip out of my pocket and I don't get charged with shoplifting.

I DID forget to buy Greek yoghurt - and that scuppers my plans for teatime tomorrow.....

I think I will go to Morrison's next time.....  Stew is finally cooking away as we speak.

Shoot me now....

Dreary.... dull, wet, and extremely windy..... and the weather is just as bad!

I've got an abscess, and I have to take this staggering amount of antibiotics.  It took me a few hours just to work out the schedule to take these antibiotics.

I'm going into no gory detail about said abscess, suffice to say, if monkeys WERE to shove bad nuts there, they'd find that they would quite quickly become ex-monkeys quicker than they could say "Davy Jones".

For example:-

Flucloxacillin (a whopping 500mg variety) - Take ONE four times a day, an hour before food or on an empty stomach (which means one hour before food or at least two hours after food) and to take them with plenty of water.

Metronidazole (200mg) - Take ONE three times a day, with or after food.  Avoid alcohol like the plague.

So I have had to set up a series of alarms on my phone that tell me when to eat, when to breathe and most importantly which tablet to take at which point in the day.... it gets to be awfully confusing.  Coupled with the fact that I don't, as a rule eat "normal" meals in the day time, and I like a drink or three...... it's hard work.

Side effects of such large doses of antibiotics are "unpredictable" to say the least....  They tend to go in one end and come out of the other in very quick succession.

So I'm stuck in a loop.... timer goes beep, I respond like Pavlov's incontinent dog!  They tell me it's all in a good cause..... let's bloody hope so because the alternative path of having the abscess excised or drained and the subsequent round of daily dressing changes is not an option I wish to consider.

Best?

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane

In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Wevz an' Ben
Gang aft a-gley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promised joy.

Official - walk's off!  Started snowing about nine of the clock last night and guess what... at ten thirty this morning it's still bloody snowing....

Pared back plans for a trip to Kinder Scout.... cancelled plans of the Colne Valley Circular..... I'm not even going out to empty the bin today!!

Drawbridge is up!