News flash

Just in case you missed this important piece of news you can read about it here.

You wanna what?

It was the spring of 1957 and Bobby went to pick up his date. When he got to the front door, the girl's father answered and invited him in.

"Carrie's not ready yet, so why don't you have a seat?" he said. "That's cool," said Bobby.
Carrie's father asked Bobby what they were planning to do. Bobby replied politely, "We'll probably just go to the soda shop or a movie." Carrie's father responded, "Why don't you two go out and screw? I hear all the kids are doing it."
Naturally, this comes as a bit of a surprise to Bobby, so he asked Carrie's Dad to repeat it.
"Yeah," said Carrie's father, "Carrie really likes to screw; she'll screw all night if we let her!"
Bobby's eyes lit up, and his plan for the evening was beginning to look pretty good.
A few minutes later, Carrie came downstairs in her little poodle skirt and announced that she was ready to go. Almost breathless with anticipation, Bobby escorted his date out the front door.

About 20 minutes later, Carrie rushed back into the house, slammed the door behind her, and screamed at her father, "Daddy! It's called 'The TWIST'!" 

Banned from the supermarket

Yesterday I was at my local Sainsbury's store buying a large bag of Winalot dog food and was in the checkout queue when a woman behind me asked if I had a dog.

What did she think I had, an elephant? On impulse I told her that no, I didn't have a dog, I was starting the Winalot Diet again. I added that I probably shouldn’t, because I'd ended up in hospital last time, but that I'd lost 2 stone before I woke up in intensive care.

I told her that it was an essentially perfect diet and that the way it works is to load your pockets with Winalot nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry. The food is nutritionally complete so it works well and I was going to try it again. (I have to mention here that practically everyone in the queue was now enthralled with my story.)

Horrified, she asked me if I ended up in intensive care because the dog food poisoned me? I told her no, I stepped off the kerb to sniff an Irish Setter's arse and got hit by a car.

I'm now banned from Sainsbury's.

The way forward

I started life by being very pro Europe and more specifically I was in favour of the Common Market as it was then envisaged way back in the 70's.
But things have changed and they've changed in a way that I dislike intensely.
Creeping federalism by some power hungry loons has meant that the EU has been put together on a piecemeal, somewhat insidious basis but more importantly in an unsustainable way.
For me this article sums up the basic problem with the entity that has emerged. You can't even get the two countries with the most to lose/gain over the Euro debacle to agree on the way forward. So what chance all 17 Euro countries.
And then the notion that 27 countries, in the wider EU, with cultures, politics and economies so diverse, agreeing on how to move forward is nothing more than fantasy, pie in the sky.
In my humble opinion there is no appetite within the population of Europe for what has emerged. Non whatsoever. If they want my advice they'd stop, completely scrap what has evolved, reconsider and propose a federal European entity and ask which countries wanted in.
It's the only way that the Euro can move forward but realistically I think it's a dead duck.
And we pay huge sums for idiots to come up with this mess. More fool us.

If you say so.......

I've often thought that supermarket cashiers got their job because they maybe offered just a little bit more than your average supermarket employee. Call me a bigot, but there you go (you're a bigot - Ed).
Anyway we were in a supermarket yesterday and Jan had put a yellow, a red and a green pepper in the same bag because the price (£ per kilo) was the same for all of them.
To the uninitiated that sort of makes sense and it's something I had done previously myself.
As the cashier tore open the bag to weigh the peppers separately Jan said to her that they were all the same price per kilo so it wouldn't make any difference.
Because the same thing had already happened to me, I whispered in Jan's ear that they probably did it for stock control purposes and that different coloured peppers probably had different bar-codes. Jan understood immediately and so far so good.
Then, the piece de resistance, as the cashier completed weighing the peppers she said, "look, it does make a difference, the red one weighs less than the green one and because each of the peppers are a different weight they cost different amounts!" Bless.
I thought the woman standing behind us was going to wet herself.

Can it be true?

So I'm sitting next to Jan, I'm watching television and she's reading a magazine. I become aware that she's looking at me and notice that she shakes her head.
Whilst I'm quite used to this strange behaviour, I ask her what she's doing.
She thrusts the article that she's reading at me and leaves me to read.
The article is headed, "Is He A Psychopath?" I was just a little disturbed to say the least. My love of the last fifteen years was wondering whether I was a psychopath.
Anyway amongst lots of other things there was a check-list that is used in conjunction with a psychiatric interview to determine whether someone is a psychopath, or not. This is the list:


1 Meticulous about his appearance (not sure why it's always a he!)
2 Glibness, superficial charm
3 Need for stimulation
4 Pathological lying
5 Cunning, manipulative
6 Lack of remorse
7 Shallow
8 Callous, lack of empathy
9 Grandiose sense of self worth
10 Parasitic lifestyle
11 Promiscuous sexual behaviour
12 Impulsiveness
13 Irresponsibility


The list goes on but I'm sure you get the drift.
Anyway, I said to Jan, "How did I do? Am I a psychopath?"
She said, "no", as if she was actually bloody contemplating it, "you fail on the first one, meticulous about his appearance."
I didn't ask her about any of the others in the list because I was scared about what she might say. 

Make it clear

I hate rules/laws that fudge the issue.
If it's wrong to hit a horse with a whip at the beginning of a race then why would it be right to hit it at the end of the race? I have no feelings either way on this issue but hate it when rules are introduced that just don't make sense.
Take the case of cutting dog's ears. It's either right or wrong, in my opinion there's no in-between.
Our dogs are Beaucerons and we got them from a breeder in France. In the period between getting Max and then Min they changed the rules. Instead of outlawing the cutting of ears altogether they introduced 'a law' stating that if the ears were cut then a breeder couldn't show the dog.
Such a ridiculous fudge. Max's ears were cut and Minnie's are natural. Again I don't have a strong view either way but laws like that should be much more clear cut. If it's wrong to cut ears then it's wrong.
I hate any form of appeasement like that, unless of course it's aimed at appeasing me!

The citizenship test

Ivan made me aware of this in another place.
I found the questions interesting but only in their irrelevance. Why would you need to know alternate names for the Church of England or whether Ulster Scots is a dialect spoken in Northern Ireland?
As a citizen of the United Kingdom I have managed quite well without this knowledge and here we are asking others questions about it. It's a joke.
I failed (64%). How did you do?
Take the test here.

Cruisin'

Mum has just come back from a short cruise to Lisbon and back. Not bad for an 87 years old. I imagined that she'd come back grumpy but not at all. She enjoyed it enormously.
Jan and I popped round for lunch today  and she couldn't stop talking about it. She went with Olsen Lines on the MS Balmoral and had nothing bit praise for the amenities, food and the trips when in port.
Frankly it's not something that really appeals to me, especially the bit about having to wear a jacket and tie for dinner. Still, not everyone's a scruff like me.
Conversations with my mum usually make me laugh because she has a different outlook on people and life. She mentioned various people that she'd met including a couple of elderly men, the first was 'self made,' but he looked a bit rough, a bit like a gangster and another who was gay, "but he had impeccable table manners", she said, as if in some way that would be unusual.
As she mentioned table manners she took a sidelong glance at me and I said, "don't I have good table manners mum?"
"You could have if you tried," she said. We just fell about.
She also mentioned another person, a lady, who was very elegant, but thin and who also had a catheter but no bladder. I was in stitches.
She couldn't get over how many old people there were, some in wheelchairs, and of course the captain.
"He was Norwegian, you know, from Norway!"
Whatever you say about my mum, she certainly cheers me up, well some of the time. Bless.

A good day

1 Turn on TV in bedroom to watch race ✔


2 Tell Jan to stop whingeing and go back to sleep ✔


3 Watch Andrew Marr ✔


4 Read Sunday Times ✔


5 Go to shops whilst Jan listens to the Archers ✔


6 Get earache from Jan cos I'm slobbing whilst she's busy in the house ✔


7 Get lovely email from friends who want to go on holiday with me and I can take Jan if I want ✔


8 All in all a very good day ☺

Connections

What's the connection between Minnie and Michael Jackson?
Well, earlier this week she had a small procedure on her paw and, according to the bill, one of the drugs the vet used to knock her out was Propofol.
But that's not all, what's my connection with Strictly Come Dancing?
Well, in a previous life I took the exams to be a tennis coach and one of the other people on the course was a somewhat slimmer Dann Lobb.
A really nice man and a very good tennis player.

A mystery

I just don't understand what all the fuss is about.

Bread and cheese

Talking about being mentally scarred - Jan asked me to pop out for some bread rolls today, pointing out that a nice lump of a really good Lancashire cheese needed eating.
I pointed out that after 15 years of 'marriage' I would have thought that she'd have realised that I rarely eat bread with cheese. An issue that stems from my childhood. From my Italian mother's attempts at making sandwiches.
Don't forget an Italian (in her day) hadn't really come across the notion of a sandwich. My mother's attempts at packed lunches  involved half a loaf of badly cut bread with several pounds of cheese in the middle producing a cheese sandwich about four inches thick.
As a growing lad I tried my best to eat them but the first mouthful was always the start of the problem. That first mouthful congealed into a solid, flat paste and stuck to the roof of my mouth and was really difficult to shift. Given the time it took to release said mess from the top of and around my mouth, lunch-time had finished and it was impossible to eat any more. I went back to class still hungry.
It was the start of my psychosis.

Memory

I must admit that I've offloaded my long-term memory into the cloud. For as long as I can remember (ho ho) I've used Google Calender to record everything I have to do.
It all started long ago when I used to make lists. 'To-do' lists that were always completed from the top so that everything was completed in chronological order without fear or favour.
I never allowed myself to move on to the next item before the previous one had been dealt with. All a bit anal but ultimately efficient.
That behaviour has continued to the present day but instead of handwritten lists my to-do list is now recorded in the calender. A calender that sits on Google's servers somewhere.  Which means that part of my brain is actually  somewhere else. How weird is that?
It's a pretty foolproof system and it allows me to grow old without having to remember anything. Excellent.

A sobering thought

No chance with the beach towels now.

The best pork pies

I'm not a great fan of pork pies, I usually find them stodgy, solid and frankly not very appetizing.
But, that's it, look no more I have found the best pork pies in the world, bar none.
Appleton's butchers in the market place in Ripon make pies that you can only dream of. If I had a criticism of other pork pies I'd say they were like solid rubber lumps of filling with hard pastry. Appleton's on the other hand are 'light as a feather', easily digestible and keep you coming back for more, so unlike anything you've ever had before.
We were out to friends for dinner and, because they're in Lancashire, we decided to take them some real honest, top quality, Yarkshire food.
As I stood in the shop, people we queuing outside just to buy these pies. The woman in front of me wanted three and they didn't have any more but the 'lad' said, 'hang on a minute I'll go check.' He came back beaming, 'they're just coming out of the oven,' he said, and sure enough minutes later he walked in with a tray of said pies.
They were so hot that we, the whole shop, all had to wait until they'd cooled down. Excellent.