Messages

My friend has now moved her birthday bash to the 23rd to fit in with school hols for people who are bringing kids, meaning I can't go. I'm gutted - would have been a fantastic drink'n'drug fuelled weekend of nostalgia with lots of mates I haven't seen for ages.

That kind of diary clash is terrible bad luck. I hate it when that happens.

My pull-cord shower switch doesn't work. I'm sure it's the fourth one we've had in eight years.

Do you leave your shower switched on when its not in use? (I mean the power, not the water) because Mark (my bro) reckons that's what buggered ours, it causes some sort of welding effect on the circuits inside the switch.

No. We always switch it off. My partner wondered if that was the problem - that we'd overworked the switch! I did notice when I took the last broken switch off that some metal component had melted to slag. I may as well buy the next replacement before investigating what happened to this one. I very much doubt it's fixable.

My pull-cord shower switch doesn't work. I'm sure it's the fourth one we've had in eight years. I am not looking forward to having that apart, buying another one or doing all that fiddling about with wires to replace it again.

Glad everyone seemed to enjoy the Dredd this week. I did deviate from Alan's script a bit but he seemed to think it kept the spirit of the story.

Pete---the art did come out a bit light actually, maybe my fault for over compensating by lightening it up too much as I've had a lot of stuff print a bit too dark of late. But having said that, it could also be a more nicer "middle class" area of the big meg (there must be some), where crime occurs less frequently than normal. Does that sound like a reasonable excuse??!!

That sounds eminently plausible to me. It looked like a nice neighbourhood.

Hooray! Welcome to the club!

Hahahaha...you can tell Pete doesn't have a better half

Or a broken femur

The red rubber bands are indeed down to postmen. Royal Mail rubber bands come in two sizes, erm - large and small - and they cost Royal Mail millions every year. For one thing a lot of them break, especially the small ones, because they are frequently overstretched. They are only meant to go round a bundle of letters side-on, not lengthways (that's what the large bands are for), but you still see postmen trying to stretch the small ones to the length of a bundle of A5 or A4 correspondence because they are too lazy to search the depot for a handful of large size, which are like the proverbial gold dust. Then the small bands they used incorrectly snap anyway.

When I was delivering I used to finish the day with a satchel pocket absolutely stuffed with rubber bands for re-use the next day. It makes sense to keep them because you don't want to waste time in the morning searching around for replacements, especially the large size. However, red rubber bands get dropped all over the place because some postman are too lazy, careless or wasteful to pocket them for re-use, but the postmen aren't exclusively to blame: some of the delivery pouches are so worn out they have holes in, so you may scrupulously deposit every used rubber band in your satchel only to find at some point along your route that you've been losing a lot of them out of a hole in the compartment you put them in.


Re: string. We sell string in the supermarket where I work. It doesn't have a very great breaking strain. I know because I used some to tie a bundle of newspapers weighing no more than 10 kilos, and the string broke when I picked it up. Thenceforth I resolved to use garden twine instead or double up on lengths of string for greater resistance.

Today I bought a bottle of (Harvey's) Amontillado and discovered I don't like it and would rather be drinking Harvey's Bristol Cream. Then I checked the receipt. The shelf-edge label gave the price as having £1.56 off, but it went through the till at full price.

Sometimes there is a happy ending!  

I took my receipt back to the supermarket yesterday and pointed out the error. The incorrect price ticket was still on the shelf, advertising the non-existent special offer. Not only did I get my £1.56 overcharge refunded, but they also gave me a quite unecessary but very welcome £2.00 gift card as a goodwill gesture, so the bottle ended up costing me less than a fiver. I've also acquired a taste for Amontillado and have drunk half the bottle already! I think I'll make it my last though: I've got better than that in my booze cupboard.

Worst character in Star Wars, ever.

The Americans sneaked in while I was asleep and stole my talent. With a weird, beeping sort of vacuum cleaner thing. I saw the whole thing unfolding right before my very eyes but I couldn't move a muscle. Then they were gone just as suddenly as they had appeared, in a hovering kind of ship shaped like a flying saucer.

SKILZ.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix_Yu7bA4Qw&feature=related

The one I used to know was demolished so that the corner it was on could be redeveloped. I think a Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall was built on the lot immediately behind it with the main entrance in a place that wouldn't have been accessible if the police box had remained. When they demolished it it became a pile of rubble rather than a pile of splinters.

[knows Mackenzie-Trench model police boxes were made of concrete and not warehouse palettes]

Let us also not forget that the TARDIS is not a police box. It is a broken alien space/time ship that can look like other things. Which bit of it is broken? The bit that makes it look like other things knows Mackenzie-Trench model police boxes were made of concrete and not warehouse palettes.

Fixed that for you.

All the intenal doors in my house are made of wood. None of them show woodgrain to any noticeable extent. My in-laws have new doors made of some sort of fake moulding. Not actually made of wood, but by golly you can the grain from 50 yards away.

[Judge Dredd]

Another Prog firing on all cylinders.

Top of the Pops this week was Alan Grant's smashing Judge Dredd short, which, incidentally, seems to draw inspiration from a film I absolutely hate. Pete Wells has said it all already. The silly and OTT ending had me laughing out loud all the way from the lounge to the kitchen.

Alan Grant's wit and humour shone again with the silly freezy-whip van menu in Cadet Anderson, from [spoiler]'spicecream'[/spoiler] to [spoiler]'vicecream'[/spoiler], and why not?

Just read that about Janet Brown - didn't know she was 87, mind. Didn't realise she was that old!

87? Well done her!