‮hjap‮

Right. I have had it with these motherfuckin' asterisks in this motherfuckin' textual medium.

If you're going to say fuck, then for fuck's sake, say fuck. Anything less, and you merely demonstrate that you lack the courage of your convictions.

It's like anything else. Either reword the sentence so that you don't have to say fuck, or, if you want to, just say fuck. This applies for other similar words, too.

Less pathetic bowdlerization of language. More saying fuck when the word fuck is required.

Today I was introduced to my new co-presenter on Kamikaze Cookery: Bunty, the Friesian cow.

I've worked with cows before, but that was back at school when I was Theseus to a particularly intransigent Hippolyta. I hear she's engaged now: I pity the guy, whoever he is. This, however, was an actual cow made of beef, and with udders and whatnot.

Fortunately, the fact that Bunty was female and a few years old meant that I didn't have to wrestle with terms like Buttercup is an individual unit of cattle or cattlebeast (but at least there actually is a non-gender-specific term). She was one of my more friendly and forgiving co-stars, but she did have something of a tendency to wander out of shot at inappropriate moments.

By about take four I was sounding impressively knowledgeable about where beef comes from and what you do with it, ably assisted from off-camera by Donna, who's been raising beef cattle since she was a wee slip of a lass and knows a hell of a lot more than I was able to get from Wikipedia. I'm not entirely sure Bunty knew what I was talking about, but she did have a tendency to swish her tail around with more obvious irritation whenever I was pointing out which bits on her were the most tasty.

And then there was the Clarkson Take, because there has to be.

I r srs documentary filmmaker. No, really.

I just got a telemarketer to hang up on me. Ah, good times. Getting ragingly angry with morons for being moronic: it has its benefits. I'm thinking about writing a lifestyle course.

~

Rory Bremner is in the Scotsman today, lamenting the unsatirizable state of modern government. He's got a point: it was so damn easy with Blair. Ping-pong ball eyes and a creepy grin and everyone knew exactly who you were. Spitting Image even did a fair job with Major, but Brown seems to have no qualities worthy of caricature.

It's a bit like having an uncle who's been building something in the shed for the last ten years [quoth he]. You go down and see what he's up to, look through the window—and there's nothing there.

It's partly our own fault. When Blair turned into a crazed warmongering lunatic (on about Day 2, as I recall), we were all frantic to get him out. What's this about some secret deal struck over bruschetta in some London restaurant?... Blair is to hand over to Brown? fantastic! Brown for President! Brown for Pope!

We all latched onto the Granita deal and waited and prayed for that glorious day when Brown would lead us triumphant into a new era with Britain free from pop-eyed gurning self-important madmen. We all got exactly what we wished for, and now people are complaining that it somehow isn't sensational enough.

Brown so far has not introduced any interesting new police-state legislation or forced us into any more illegal wars. Nor, to my knowledge, has he spent ninety per cent of his time saying look at it from my perspective and what you must understand is this. He is, in fact, almost exactly like that last episode of Doctor Who: nothing happened in it, but at least it didn't have farting aliens and blowjob jokes and Peter Kay.

~

Also in the Scotsman today is a letter from D MacDonald of Edinburgh, whose woe is expressed thus:

With the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns on the near horizon, it seems pertinent to point out that Edinburgh does not have a street named in honour of our national poet. This is surely an appropriate time to consider remedying this anomaly.

D MacDonald neglects to mention that, while it is true that we have no street, you can't walk for ten yards in the Old Town without colliding with a plaque celebrating the fact that the quill-wielding hack once paused near here to tie his shoelaces.

I have never understood the point of Burns and I never will. The man sold out rich millennia of Scottish culture and history for personal gain, and he was successful to such an extent that we are known across the planet as a race of skirt-wearing offal-munchers who can't talk properly. Scots isn't even a language: it's a dialect, and since the one linguist on my friends list appears to have gone crazy-religious and dropped off the Internet, there's no one to debate me on this point.

No one, ever, has ever said fair fa' yer honest sonsie face unless they're reading that crappy poem on the night we have dedicated to the ink-slinging old fool. Sonsie isn't even a word.

The man's got a national holiday, a dozen statues, two sets of commemorative stamps, and a plaque on every street corner in the land. I'm quite happy that we name our streets instead after obese stocking-clad Germans and their retarded inbred offspring. Let's at least try to give the impression that there's a bit more to Scotland than tartan haggises and bagpipes, shall we?

Today at the Farmers' Market was the Great Scottish Sausage Taste-Off, although they spelled it differently. (Taste off, without a hyphen, is what the sausages do when you've left them out for too long.) Three of the finest local farms went head-to-head, or rather skin-to-skin, with the Finest™ range from three of our mighty supermarket chains.

A blind tasting was arranged, with paper plates labelled A to F, cocktail sticks at ten paces, and a thronging crowd of blue-rinsed biddies who gave every impression they were standing in a queue when they were, in fact, merely dithering. The cocktail sticks provided were insufficient for me to rectify this situation to my satisfaction, and stormsearch wouldn't allow me to appropriate the knife they were using to cut up soss.

Of the soss on offer (sossonoffer—try saying that with a mouthful of the aforementioned), it was easy to tell the superior locally-sourced farm produce from their inferior, wraithlike mass-produced counterparts. If nothing else, the amount of added water gave it away. On the one hand we had soulless cylinders of reconstituted offal and tubular forcemeat. On the other... was Sausage.

It was quite interesting—one of the supermarket sausages actually had a really nice balance of herbs and spices, but even so the meat itself was pale and bland. (Pigling Bland?) Despite the best efforts of a whole team of food scientists paid fuck-you money by a multinational corporation, there's still no substitute for looking after your animals and not cramming in stupid crap to reduce costs. And thus, as I have always said, do Happy Pigs Make The Best Bacon.

Of the three True Sausages, the one that both stormsearch and I rated most highly was—we were told in nudge-nudge wink-wink say-no-more fashion by the vaguely disturbing chap organizing the Taste-Off—Piperfield Pork, suppliers to no less a luminary than Dr B himself and, oddly enough, the only one of the three I haven't tried yet. My freezer (and J's too) is already way too full of meat, so I shall have to wait until next week's market to acquire some, when the results of the Taste-Off are announced.

( Spoilers! )

Today I are mostly eatin' Rannoch smoked chicken on organic rye bread, which I picked up from a deli near work. I am having a good day. And I have been organic and locally-sourced, and my Food Miles have been minimal. Much more importantly, the food has been fantastic.

Many 'struggling' with storytime

Parents, grown-up men and women, responsible for the safeguard of Our Future, are apparently having difficulty reading books intended for five and ten year olds.

Ten per cent of people polled in the recent Learndirect study, it says here, have children and are by definition too stupid to have children.

Why do these acephalous morons procreate? Condoms are free. Why would anyone bring a life into this world if they can't look after it?

(incredibly obscure reference)

OKCupid (I'm only on it for the quizzes, I swear) keeps sending me information about young ladies with whom the website thinks I might want to hook up, presumably for candlelit dinners and long walks on the beach.

Today's gem is one such young lady who describes herself as thrustworthy.

~

On the subject of romance: I think we've all been there.

Guest yesterday: What's the internet like here?
Yr. corresp.: It's the same one as everywhere else.

Stupid spam mail today: How many bookings do You get per Internet?

Roughly 100%. Now get the hell out of my inbox.

~

Realised this morning that, further to my previous post, I had yet to test the Phantom theme on the Cube of +5 Neighbour Annoyance.

(I like organs, okay?)

Now I suffer the consequences with this utterly unshakable earworm. Damn you, Lloyd Webber, daaamn yooooou.

Tried to pick up some Fringe programmes today. To do so I had to navigate (nay, brave) the Royal Mile during the day. It was, simply, madness. In an ideal world, no man should ever have to breathe another's sweat, unless of course he wants to.

I spent some time chatting to the director of Coastline, who apparently has a reasonable grasp of American politics (as one might expect of the director of a show about American politics), but insufficient grasp of British politics to know which newspapers she should try to get reviews in. I spent some time attempting to correct this, and then, over the course of the three medical appointments I had today (at least one of which was mine), I got a chance to actually peruse the Festival programme.

Last year there were three versions of the Scottish Play. This year there are seven: and yet the eighth appears, who bears a glass/Which shows me many more.

There were a couple of random, bleached-blonde, not particularly intelligent Essex-girl-type morons wandering down the Meadows today. One of them was yammering into her phone. ``Katy and me are here in Edinburgh...'' The other one turned and said, ``Katy and I''. It almost, but not quite, gave me a renewed faith in humanity. (Also please note: it's not just meI who does that.)

There was a rather good Gospel choir[0] rehearsing on the Meadows[1]. There was a good singer and a corresponding good dance routine. I could have dealt with this until I realised that they'd managed to chalk sanctimonious God-slogans all over the entire path, over which I had to walk (scuffing my heels as often as possible) in order to get home. I cold have dealt with that, too, until they finished their dance routine and one of them went up to the microphone and shouted ``Hello, Edinborrow!''

At this point the red mist takes over, and the next thing I remember is standing in the middle of the corpse-strewn and bloodied field, shouting ``they kin tak oor lives, but they cannae tak oor bizarrely unpronouncable consonontal conjugations!''[2], or something similar.

Note To Americans And Other Aliens: it's ``Edinburgh''. If you can't manage anything else, say ``edin-bruh'' and you'll probably live.

Later, at work: I directed a pair of nice American ladies to the local Howie's restaurant, which they clearly enjoyed, and when they returned I treated them to a a brief historical tour of the building. One said: ``Has anyone ever told you that you look just like Russell Crowe?'' ...to which, after five minutes of laughing out loud, I had to reply ``No, but soon everyone will know this''.

Shortly afterwards, one of the boss' friends turned up, whom I haven't seen since I was working at the hotel a year ago. He said ``So, when did you start with the whole Russell Crowe look?''

Emergency note to all females who read this: is Russell Crowe hot?

Have thus far had notice of about three or four plays that I wouldn't mind seeing at the Fringe should I get time (and far too much utter dross written by John Fucking Godber, of whom I harbour a passionate hatred beyond the boundaries of all imagining). I spent the evening watching The Third Man and getting horribly drunk. That's quite enough Art And Culture for me.

--
[0] I just tried to spell that `quoir'. Clearly, my English skills are failing. I'm getting old.

[1] I would be less receptive if I hadn't earlier been listening to a radio station that decided, for reasons of its own, to start playing ``Free Nelson Mandela''. You know the song in question. It goes, ``freeeeee, Nelson Mandela'', and then continues in much the same vein. And it's quite catchy.

[2] N.B.: `facts' expressed in this article may or may not be true. If you have a problem with this, you haven't been reading me long enough.

I have to sit through a two-hour lecture every Wednesday morning on Professional Issues, which thus far has been a total of four hours of "you can't even spell properly, can you, you little bastards".

Last week we had a visit from a nice lady who wanted us all to join the British Computer Society. She said that the BCS exists to promote knowledge of the importance of professionalism in IT and that she, personally, was unaware of the importance of professionalism in IT until she joined the BCS. At this stage her head started revolving widdershins and she stared chanting "one of us, one of us, one of us".

At no stage have they defined what they mean by `professionalism', which seems pretty damn unprofessional to me.

This week was moderately fun, if ridiculously patronising---we were given a bunch of sentences and told to point out which were ungrammatical, because employers' perceptions of students are that we're all illiterate, autistic, arrogant bastards. One of the sentences was "Me and Jim went down the pub", which of course is incorrect because it should be "Jim and I", but then the lecturer went off and a tangent about "down the pub"---apparently this should be "to the pub", so I pointed out that "down the pub" is a colloquialism. He said it was still wrong, so I asked him if it should then be "public house". We were swiftly moved on to the next question.

Later on, someone else pointed out a grammatical error on one of the lecture slides ("Which of these words is incorrect"), and there was much hilarity.

I suppose you had to be there.

There was also a long argument about whether or not we should correct the grammar inside the reported speech in some of the examples. Conclusions reached: while computer science graduates may or may not be arrogant, uncommunicative or illiterate, we're almost all complete bloody pedants.