Sunday, February 26, 2012

Jings, crivens, from eating to bleating and carnage in between

Howdy Lums,


That's in honour of the Superduper bowl that was on when I started writing this.  I saw more of it than normal, at least an hour, which included about 7 minutes of actual play, before retiring to sleepy town.  I've only a vague idea of whats going on, but how can it not be a spectacle worth watching, its 65 aside and the sporty equivalent of head butting buffalo's.


January and February have been annoying months, well, I mean, more things than normal have annoyed me, and not January or February being annoying, though, thinking about it, they are shitty months, long, cold, wet, skint and full of annoying happenings.


Frankie and Bennys new  cutlery friendly
departure lounge menu
The first thing that really annoyed me was the dinner I snatched in Stansted airport.  

Starving and on a low carbs diet, I plumped for a steak from the generic Italian themed diner.   Let me tell you how arduous eating an airport steak is post 9/11.  Its because of the cutlery, the knife they give you is like the one that comes with a play-doh gift set.  It was going like a fiddlers elbow trying to get through that thing, I swear I expended more energy than I managed to take in. There was no cutting edge to the knife, so I have to imagine it was the heat generated by my berserk sawing that melted the steak into sinewy separation.  I nearly missed my flight with the time it took to eat that thing, and I couldn't lift my bag because of the lactic burn in my slicing arm.

Back to vaguely interesting things.  At work I was visited by a boffin from one of those secretive government departments that come up with James Bonds gadgets.  Or at least, thats what I'm pretty sure they do, and not as a colleague dismissively suggested, just sorted the WiFi in GCHQ.  This guy, with his pasty skin, ponytail and and long leather overcoat had obviously spent a lot of time watching Blade movies but it was also an indication that these people don't get brought to the surface often.  The language he used probably makes perfect sense deep down in the brain bunker as he and his chums try and reproduce all the technology from Star Trek but up here, among IQs that average less than a hundred, its like the white noise radio astronomers get excited about. And why did he want to speak with me?  I would tell you, but they are probably monitoring my keystrokes from space and the guy sitting in the corner of the cafe looks like a background extra from Underworld, so for the moment, I'll keep that to myself.

I went to the pictures a couple of weeks ago to see Carnage, excellent it was, genuinely laugh out loud funny despite the woman sitting next to me, pulling her phone out every 5 minutes to send or receive a text, or to check if she had received one, or even just to have a look at her screen saver, because it makes her smile or something.  
I've just invented an indiscreet i-phone user
   bludgeoning device  


This is almost as annoying as a ring tone.  In the darkness of the cinema, the brilliant light from her poxy       i-phone was an all pervading distraction, I began to feel like a bug, hypnotised by the light, getting drawn towards it with dreams of nirvana flashing across my mothy brow.  Nirvana for me though would have been grabbing her phone in mid-text and throwing it with all my might down the cinema.    I imagined it spinning   through the air in slow motion, like the femur in Space Odyssey, and as it landed, the entire audience, but one, two if you count her pathetic boyfriend, would stand up and cheer, hoist me to their shoulders and carry me all the way to The Office of Cinema Etiquette, where I would unveil a statue of me hurling an i-phone (other makes of phone are available and equally annoying).

I see faces...everywhere
That was annoying, but THE most annoying thing, and its really getting on my thruppennies is the language used in facebook updates.  Why do Scottish people, and remember, I am one of them, feel the need to write a status update as if they are a Broons scriptwriter, typing phonetically exactly how it comes out their mouths.  Now, phonetics is a wonderful teaching technique for three year olds, but if your old enough to work facebook, your old enough to write English.  I can, and often do speak in my home town dialect, and I can understand it like a native when its spoken to me, but its really hard to get your eyes around it when its written down.  And before anyone says " your jist aw saft noo yiv gaun tae london" " an ener hing, am gaun ooot tae get pished" " Jings crivvens n help ma boab PC Murdoch is gaun tae catch us plunderin aipples" or anything like that,  remember you write for others, whats the point of writing a status update for yourself, you already know what your doing, so it would be nice to read your status updates with all the letters in the proper order or at least, if your going for  "a braw Scots tongue" and that can be great. Example, DC Thomas has never been hard to read, but they don't mangle it and go out of their way to replace commonly used English words with some made up regional short cut.    

Saying that,

Lang may yer lum reek.