Leftism

Leftism. I discovered about a year ago that my ears are on the wrong way round. My right earphone kept falling out causing me to lose the benefit of stereo. I had become a Cyclops of the music world.


Where did Cyclops' go? When I was a kid they were everywhere and I had to concern myself with such things as lava and piranhas.

Whatever the ear equivalent to a Cyclops is, my earphones didn't fit. The natural thing to do in this situation is to check if the right earphone fits in the left ear. It did. What happened next was nothing short of astounding. The right earphone was a perfect fit for my left ear. I felt like Cinderella.

These prescription earphones help. One of the buds is slightly larger than the other. Also a simple colour coding distinguishes the left from the right. I'd advise to get down to the doctors and get checked out.

The Stephen Fry Of Skea

It's the middle of the night and I'm awoken by the sound of the microwave - BEEP... BEEP. About a minute later - BEEP... BEEP - again. So I decide to investigate and there is a bowl of porridge in the microwave that has been sitting a while. This is no Goldilocks and The Three Bears story. Our microwave beeps once it has heated something until you open the door.

The owner of this porridge could be no other than my very own flatmate Nachy. He has once again returned and attempted to cook a wee snack. On this particular occasion he also managed to turn on everything in the house - the lights in the hall, living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and office. Electrical appliances including the computer and television in both the living room and his own bedroom.

This was a while back, but again, just last night, I got up to the opening of the door and a punch drunk Nachy navigating his way to the kitchen. Yes, you guessed it, to make a snack. Big Soup this time with a bit of toast.

I go back to bed but wake an hour later to find him curled up on the sofa, Big Soup and toast in his belly - and absolutely everything on. The BBC iPlayer had stopped and he had been watching The Wonders Of Science. At least our Nachy had got the grub into him this time. I turned off the TV and went back to bed only to hear him shuffle off to his own a little later.

In the morning I'm woken by his alarm. It goes off for twenty minutes before he wakes. Sometimes he falls out of bed and tries to climb back in but only gets halfway. This is why he's my flatmate.

For Nachy

The Time Traveller's Wife

I knew I shouldn't have set about trying to explain the difference between time travel and teleportation at the club. It would be natural to assume that if you had a time machine you could teleport and vice versa. However as with life ("Life oh life oh life..." - Des'ree), it is not so.


To learn the fundamentals of time travel and teleportation it is necessary to watch two films only. The first concerns the former and is predictably Back To The Future (1985). For teleportation please refer to The Fly (1986). The dates of the films are of no coincidence, one serving to clarify some of the questions left by the other. If you refer to one of my other posts regarding short attention spans and you feel unable to sit through these masterpieces then condensed material exists. An episode of Quantum Leap would suffice the time travel realms whilst The Fly was eloquently parodied by The Simpsons.

Having given you the material there is now the fundamental first law of how not to make friends. Or as I call it, the screening process for interesting friends. To teleport you need two pieces of equipment the secondary of which you place at the required destination. The teleporter is placed where you want to travel from. This differs to time travel in that only the time machine is required. Therefore, by simple logic, you may postulate that you cannot travel back or forward in time with a teleporter as the receiving point must be placed prior to use. Some would say a time machine may be a teleporter but this is beyond the scope of this blog.

What is the point in all of this? Simple - I don't know.
This is not one night stand material.

Pay Attention

I set out to write a short note on how I feel my attention span is diminishing and in the process switched to read the news, checked my Facebook and played with a bit of blue tack on the desk. It is as if my brain is no longer content with fulfilling one task before another request is engaged - and soon another and another - until I have a screen full of open windows and a desk with a cup of coffee and a Venus De Milo perfectly molded out of blue tack. Soon it is a ball of blue tack again. What the fuck has gone wrong here?

The stimulus that we are exposed to compared to even a decade ago has grown exponentially. We can't even content ourselves with listening to a predefined order of music. This is not only killing the music album but is a manifestation of the problem itself. As evil as this is, there is an even darker side to the phenomenon.

The media have reacted to our short wired brains to further exacerbate the problem by distilling the news to fit in that 3 second flash in which our attention can be interrupted from the very last thing we were thinking. This disturbs me as much of the news is complex issues. Our opinion is formed by a headline about a subject we know nothing about. It is with this ease of manipulation that tabloid newspapers can effectively spirit up a lynch mob and send them out to deal the fair and just beating deserved.
At least witches had trials.

I See Signs All The Time

If I am going to print a sign I'm going to have it proof read. This one is subtle and actually took my mind working all at once to figure out what was wrong. In the process I pissed and shat myself (to access the pre-frontal cortex I have to bypass the cingulate gyrus which controls my bladder function). It's like a brain barf in other words.

Yes, -20% off is a double negative implying that I have to pay a fifth more. Almost as fun as the Aroma Coffee sign in Edinburgh which read 'You're cup of coffee' implying that I was a cup of coffee. Genius.

Reviewing Reviews

It's review time at work again. Time to back fill another set of criteria retrospectively. If you're unfamiliar with large corporate management ideology it operates on merit based rewards, matching the company goals to that of your own, making objectives and reporting on them about this time every year. My ass in other words. A whole department has grown around the process. The process of monitoring progress. What was wrong with sticky gold stars? I'm sure we all fit into the Gaussian distribution, but what says +3sigma like a chart full of gold stars.

So I'm stuck with providing examples of how I have been Customer Orientated or contributed to Team Synergy. Yes, Team Synergy. It's become epidemic. Every reasonably sized organisation has bought in these people who justify their jobs by creating ever more inappropriate forms for me to fill in.
There is no need. I will make your form.

Is he/she a Great Bunch Of Lads?
Yes/No
[Delete as appropriate]

Yes, and receive an inflation based pay rise. No, fuck all.

Beef Exports

Holiday photos are shit. Come on. Really. If I need a photo of some landmark or other I'll Google Images (Save Image As...) rather than pointlessly photograph it myself. Look, here's one I took of the Eiffel Tower. Easily passed off as my own even though I've never been wherever it is. But where am I? Where's the Beef? Well it wouldn't particularly matter for the past 3 holidays I have only 3 photos, and I'm only in one.



I include these photos here for posterity. Firstly, If you've ever been in a dodgy lift just be thankful you weren't in Schindler's Lift which I first experienced in Budapest. This is in fact a real lift manufacturer based in the UK.



The next photo is 'Me On Gangs' taken in Krakow outside our apartment. Yes, that door is the door of our apartment and the year is 2008 and the car is real. This apartment is not a patch on Madrid, but I don't have a photo of that. Instead, the only photo from Madrid is this skip. Irish people love construction stuff. And so this is my last 3 holidays in 3 photos. Up yours.