Apathy Sketchpad

It is very important that I bring this story to light, before someone else does. I wouldn’t want a repeat of the… unpleasantness with Alistair last year, where he regularly misses out a vital part of a story that then makes me sound like a complete git.

We were going to Adam Whitlock’s house, to meet their new hamster (who, just for background information, was something of a no-show), and, as you may know, Adam has turned his Peugeut 205 GTi into a rather credible rally car, including bucket seats in the front. The thing, though, about bucket seats is that they don’t tilt forward like regular seats do, and this means that the best way to the back seats is through the boot. This isn’t actually a major problem, though it isn’t great fun when there are five of you.

Stavros (who I think has all but stopped reading this column) is a git. He walked straight out of the house, stood next to the passenger side door, and used a look I have only seen once before, and that was when he was stood outside Adam’s passenger side door at the LA Bowl. It means “instead of getting into this car without drawing attention to myself, I am going to stand here grining like an idiot while I watch you get into the back of this car, and I’m going to enjoy it”. And then he said “Well?”

The first time he did this it annoyed me almost more than anything else he’d done thus far, but I was willing to let it go. This time, I was a bit annoyed, so I decided to play him at his own game. I stood perfectly still and said “shotgun front”. Logically, since he used it in the past and expected us to respect it, he would too. Unfortunatley, he’s not so much logical as he is American, so this didn’t work. faced now with a new problem I walked to the front passenger door too. He started to get in the car, and I attempted to stop him by force, by pulling on his sleeve (his sleeve being the only available part of him I’d be willing to touch). “Stop it,” he protested, “Stop before you rip it.”
“I al–”
“Stop it before you rip it.”
“I already ripped it.” At this point I realised he was going in the front and there wasn’t much I could do about it. Personally, I think this has as much to do with the design of the bucket seating as it does to do with Stavros’ strength. As I was currently working at Stavros’ approximate maturity level, I took the only course of action I could see available to me. I took his shoe.

On my way through, I dropped the shoe in the boot of the car, and let Stavros sit in the front, the whole time thinking I’d left his shoe outside our house.

David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst dragged out for another special.
The e-topup line is busy.
Tapered cuboid boxes everyone knows contain chocolates.
Taking the fairy lights out of cold storage only to discover they no longer work.
The annual visit from cousins.
Morcambe and Wise repeats.
Breaking a bauble. Just one, every year.
The Private Eye Annual.
A calendar.
Reviving the worst thing you did the previous year because it’s Chrsitmas again

Articulate (The Fast-Talking Description Game) has been showing an advert lately with a woman apparently being hit by a tree. It’s not a great advert, but it’s okay. Or it would be, if it weren’t for the second of video tacked on the end showing the woman standing up, quite unharmed. This is done so as not to offend people. I find this deeply offensive. Well, alright, I find this only very slightly offensive, but I do like irony.

This kind of behaviour has been termed “pulling a Kipling”, after Mr. Kipling, whose advert about killing a dog, but on the other hand making exceedingly good cakes, was similarly ruined by a second of footage of said dog, emerging from the river unscathed, but it can be traced further back than that. The earliest recorded case was the old Fruit Pastilles advert showing a woman being eaten by a dinosaur. Somehow, they got away with cutting out the second or so of the advert where the jaws close. Apparently, we are expected to assume the woman made a miraculous last minute escape, possibly aided by the juicy sweets, we just don’t know.

No animals were hurt in the making of this column.

Yesterday the Times reported that Britain is becoming “a nation of childless single women”. Fine.

I have long believed that messages like “25p4evrytxturcv” do not constitute legally binding contracts, for the simple reason that they plainly make no sense. I just reviewed the terms and condtions of my uni.cc domain. Item two states that they can change the service at any time without notice. This is just as well, since the next item, stating that they can change information at any time without notice, is numbered “1″. Is this still legal? Probably, I think.

As you must presumably know if you can still find this website, I recently had to find a new server. One of the ones I turned down (though I did set up an account with) was ProHosting.com, who, you may notice, I did not link to just then. The reason I turned them down at the time was that I objected to having my 404 error page replaced by pornography, particularly when the server was not very reliable and kept throwing up 404 errors.

I just recieved an email from ProHosting.com, to inform me that I owed them $9.95. It goes on to say “Thank you for allowing ProHosting Corporation to host your FREE web site.”. The nerve. Then the bastards signed it “Your friends at ProHosting Corporation”. Needless to say, they won’t be getting any money from me. I’ve half a mind to sue (but then it is twenty five to five in the morning, and I am rather drunk).

I recently finished a packet of Sainsbury’s “Hot and Spicy Chicken Wings”. The packaging informs me these are “delicious hot or cold.” Which is lucky, really.

Some time ago, I wrote a column about our BT OpenWorld broadband connection, and how long it took them to set it up. I reccomend them wholeheartedly. This is largely because the alternative, depending on where you live, is either ntl or Telewest. My student house is in an ntl area, which appears to be the digital equivalent of a hard water area. I have finally found another (reasonably) reliable web server, and I find my ISP has packed in.

While I’m here, I may as well add ntl to the list of digital TV services I have ‘reviewed’ here. The ntl digital service has some nice features, for example you can move the channels around, but also has some disadvantages. First, the GUI is the ugliest of any digital service. Secondly, the basic package has almost no channels, though the “Guest” channel is a brilliant idea. Thirdly, and most worryingly, the signal is terrible. The colours are dulled, the picture is blurry, and every so often the thing doesn’t update the whole screen or packs in completely.

This is also broadly true of their internet service. Periodically, it decides it’s going to run so slowly it signs us out of MSN Messenger. Sometimes it turns itself off completely and we have to phone NTL to get them to reset the connection, then reboot the server.

Which is the kind of behaviour we’re getting rather used to, since our landlord (well, his agent) is currently not fitting our showerhead. This is forgivable, though, really, since there is a big hole in the wall he hasn’t fixed where it’s supposed to go, and in any case, we don’t want to be showering in there until he’s fitted a shower curtain and stopped the door blowing open if it’s windy. Perhaps we can also forgive his failure to attach blinds or curtain rails to three windows, since one of said windows is currently made largely out of wood and parcel tape, having been smashed by skutters a week ago. Maybe we can even forgive the fact there are no handles on the cupboard doors in the kitchen, because some of them are fitted backwards anyway.

And now Adam tells me something else has happened to his car.

It has been quite some time since I was last able to update the site, and in that time, a lot of stuff has come to me that I couldn’t publish. Which was annoying. So here, in no particular order, it is.

Most recently, (in fact just a minute ago) I closed down an Internet Explorer window. That is, I right clicked the button down on the taskbar, and selected “close” from the menu, and Windows brought up a dialogue, as it seems to like to do these days when I interrupt it, to ask if I wanted to close Internet Explorer now, or wait. I’m not quite certain who would tell a computer to close Internet Explorer, and then think, “not yet, though… In a second,” but it’s good to know they accomodate for that kind of a person, isn’t it?

Before that, I saw an advert on the side of a phone box for 8 Mile, which is Eminem’s new film, as you probably know, and as these adverts often do, it had a quotation from a review. Now, perhaps this film is good. I don’t know. I’ve been told it’s good, but then I’ve been told a lot of things. All I know for certain is that the best quote they could find was “a cinematic event”. It just isn’t very emotional. Not to me, anyway, and not, I think, to other people. You wouldn’t be taken in by “Escapology: An Audio Recording”, or “The Ford Focus: A Car”.

On Thursday, as well, I have an exam in Quantum Mechanics, which I don’t really want to do. The way I think of it, until Thursday I know everything and nothing about quantum mechanics. If they measure my knowledge they’ll change it, and then the whole exercise is demonstrably pointless. Although that said, that would actually be something of a relief, seeing as how I’ve been quite publicly of the opinion that the whole thing is pointless from the beginning. The thing is, you see, I understand physics quite well. It’s just something to do with the way my brain is wired up. It can’t spell, and it’s general knowledge is just bloody awful, but it’s wired up for physics and it can do that well. What it is not designed to do is memorize equations. Personally, I’m quite happy to forgive this failing. Mankind did not evolve with equations in mind. Neaderthal man did not track mammoths using calculus. We evolved to kill things, and eat them. Sometimes we cooked them, and those members of the tribe evolved into Jamie Oliver, and made lots of money. There was never any merit to being able to solve quadratic equations, and when mankind invented the quadratic equation, he also invented the printing press so he didn’t need to remember things. But the university don’t see it this way. They apparently think we’re going to be in jobs that rely largely on our knowing the time independant Schrödinger equation. I can’t actually think of any such jobs right at this very second, but presumably they exist, or else why train us to do them? Come to that, though, the university seems to think we’re going to apply for jobs where we’ll be given four important projects to do, and them asked to pick two and complete them.

I can, in fact, think of a job that would require me to know the time independant Schrödinger equation, but I don’t think I want to become a physics lecturer. For one thing, it would mean hanging around with other physics lecturers, which is not something that appeals to me. I have, with help from my friends, spent most of the last year trying to minimise our contact with physics lecturers, and don’t see any reason to change the plan now. And besides, physics lecturers are a strange bunch. They try to use real world analogies to explain the laws of physics, which is a good idea, but for two small flaws:

1. The laws of physics, by definition, are the real world
2. Physics lecturers do not live in the real world.

They inhabit their own special physics lecturer dimension, where combovers look good, sandals are fashionable*, and it’s quite unacceptable to say something “sucks”, or “you’ll let the cold in” because that isn’t technically the way things operate but it is perfectly okay to say “this electron wants to be over here”.

I was disappointed today when, looking through my Favourites list, I discovered that some miserable git at AT&T has blocked the Armageddon Watch website. Well, how will we know when it’s the Armageddon now? The site, presumably, fell prey to the same laws as the Two Towers Protest Site, a delightfully idiotic page set up by well-meaning but basically stupid people who are extremely angry at film makers for trying to cash-in on the September 11 attacks by calling a film The Two Towers. I’m not about to sit here and list all the reasons this is imbecilic, but rest assured that if you need me to tell you why, this page is probably a bit high-brow for you.

All of this leads me, eventually, to one piece of advice: Check out www.alexchiu.com before they close that too. There’s quite a lot of it, so I’ll summarise:

Alex Chiu is an idiot who thinks he has developed an “Eternal Life Device”.

In more detail, he believes that placing a magnet either side of your pinky (the fingers, of course, being the positive and negative terminals of your body — presumably you should plug them into the mains to recharge, unless we run on DC) will amplify the natural magnetic energy in your body and allow your cells to line up better, and make you look lounger, heal faster, and live forever. Apparently, their “lawyer told [them] to use the word believe”. This was good advice on the part of their lawyer, but a more thorough lawyer may have suggested removing the word “proof” from half his pages. And maybe the phrase “Everything you read is true and is important”.

I suspect, though, that the lawyer was a tad busy. He had to write their disclaimers, which range from the standard “Please consult your doctor if you have a heart problem or if you are pregnant before using this device.” to the slightly Engrish “All written and oral statements are my true beliefs. There are at this moment not yet medicalclaims. I am basically writing this disclaimer to protect myself from the FDA. Thedevices are for research and experimentation of the buyers. Not to be carried outas treatment on someone else’s body.”, and culminate in his guarantee. His guarantee is separated into two lists.

The rings are believed (but not guaranteed) to:

1. Alter aging process. (Turn a person physically younger.)
2. Allow humans to stay physically young forever.
3. Cure various kinds of illnesses and diseases.
4. Improve health.

Alex Chiu guarantees:

1. Speedy delivery

But, as Alex says, “I am not one of those stupid moron who don’t know what I am doing”, so obviously he patented his design. Surely not even the US Patent Office would allow this? This is his patent document (which includes his postal address). The truly bizzare thing about it is that it has been cited as a reference by another patent. Somebody has based an invention on the Magnetic Immortality Device.

The other intresting thing I found on the patent office website was the “Kids Section”. I quickly tired of this, and decided to type in a URL I’d seen on TV, in an advert for The Video Copilot. I thought it was a joke. When I first saw the advert, I genuinely expected the Egg logo to appear and offer me a credit card. But it turned out to be a wonderfully worthless device from the makers of the Garden Claw, a company called (really) Joseph Enterprises, who also offer monthly gardening tips from Peter Surridge, who is well known “as the horticultural expert who demonstrates the Garden Claw on TV”. This month (september, apparently), he reccomends using the Garden Claw. Isn’t that a suprise?