What Would You Do If…(The Velociraptor Game)
August 1, 2008
Work tedium is difficult to alleviate unless you are blessed with deep inner resources, like Hannibal Lector. I cannot claim to have invented this game, it just kind of evolved all by itself (but if anyone asks or tries to claim otherwise, herein lies the evidence that I gave it formally to the world).
This is a game that is both therapeutic and entertaining and can be played either individually, or you can involve colleagues (this works if you have interdepartmental email that isn’t monitored) but it has to be said, it’s more fun alone.
Here’s how to play.
You sit at your desk. Look around you, what do you see? Consider your surroundings, the items you have to hand. Now imagine a Velociraptor has just entered the room. What do you do?
Hide under your desk? Lame.
Push your colleagues into its path? Better.
Or climb up on your desk, push aside a ceiling tile and climb into the roof space? Now you’re thinking.
What if you don’t have ceiling tiles? Where would your nearest exit be? How many people would you have to beat out of the way to get there? Maybe now is the time to start thinking about keeping an AK-47 in your desk drawer.
What about electrocution? Pretend you’re Roy Scheider and shove some electrical cable in its mouth.
Blind it with a fire extinguisher, or you could try the risky strategy of trapping it in the lift.
Would you attempt to rescue your colleagues or would you consider them collateral damage and work on your own escape?
Of course if you’re one of those people that can’t possibly imagine a Velociraptor gaining entry to your work premises, that your brain cannot process a prehistoric creature crashing its way towards your desk then you need to play the alternate version of this game: Zombie Apocalypse.
Standard zombie rules apply.
- Zombies DO NOT run, they shamble, slowly.
- Zombies will eat you if they catch you and game is over.
- If you are bitten, you WILL become a zombie and the game is over.
So we begin again. At your desk, tra la la and hark! Is that a zombie I hear groaning outside the door?
Now your fight or flight response should kick in. You may like to imagine yourself as a kick-ass action hero, with ninja-like fighting skills and the ability to fashion a deadly weapon out of a roll of sticky tape and a hole punch.
You know the zombie rules, go for brain right? Kill the brain, kill the zombie. What do you have to hand? A heavy bin? A computer monitor? Hey what about using the fire extinguisher again?
But what if there’s more than one? Ah you didn’t plan on that did you?
Anyone who knows anything about zombies knows that the best plan of attack is to run away. They’re hardly going to catch up with you anytime soon. Grab something sharp and pointy – anything that can be driven through an eye socket into the soft grey matter of the brain.
From this point onwards, WWYDI becomes a game of survival, how would you survive a zombie apocalypse. Contingency plans people.
Read the literature, watch Ray Mears, stock up on bottled water and canned goods and, most importantly, choose your bolthole with care. If you’ve read the ‘about‘ section of this blog, you’ll have already learned one important fact about where I live.
Zombie apocalypse is really a game for the pros. You need to know your stuff and whilst I don’t know anything worth knowing, I do know how to deal with the undead. Sadly people seem to under-rate this skill when evaluating CV’s.
WWYDI, the Velociraptor version is much more entertaining. It’s faster and more deadly than playing with zombies. And the real beauty of the game is you only have to be as honest as you want.
For example, I would like to think that I could defeat a velociraptor with a quick blast from the extinguisher, a live monitor shoved between its jaws and then a nimble exit up into the roof space to freedom.
In reality I move about as fast as a sloth, weigh roughly the same as a small hatchback and am as fit as those decomposing zombies that I can barely out-walk, never-mind outrun. I would therefore sacrifice myself to the creature, allowing it to devour me whilst my sylph-like colleagues run away.
But that’s the beauty of playing this game by yourself, you only have to be as honest as your private conscience allows.
This means I’m actually a deadly combination of Lara Croft, Jill Valentine and Dame Ellen MacArthur.
Yes I am a Ninja, no you cannot see my moves.
.
Have They Still Got An Awful Lot Of Coffee in Brazil?
July 23, 2008
“Way down among Brazilians
Coffee beans grow by the billions
So they’ve got to find those extra cups to fill
They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil”Music and Lyrics by Bob Hilliard, Dick Milles
Well according to Wikipedia the short answer is yes. There is still an awful lot of coffee in Brazil. 2.59 million metric tons in 2006 say the figures.
Which is nothing short of good news for us coffee lovers.
Can you imagine if coffee were like fuel? Queues of angry shoppers, frustrated book-buyers and desperate morning commuters, lined up outside Starbucks and Costa Coffee, waving their travel mugs and complaining about the rising price of beans and VAT.
A perculatory panic.
Whether you have a black Americano or a half-fat, decaf latte with a shot, a caramel Macchiato (dessert) or, like me, the coffee of the day, served black, hot and in a mug you could take a bath in, coffee is the stimulant of choice.
Tea just doesn’t cut it when you crave that caffeine hit.
Where I work we have free coffee from automated vending machines. It tastes as if there is a cigarette butt loitering at the bottom of the plastic cup, but it’s free so no one is complaining. Well I am, but no one listens to me.
This of course leads to another problem with coffee. As an ex-smoker of some two years standing, when I have a mug of coffee in my left hand, I become frustrated as to what to do with my right (answers on a postcard please, diagrams welcome). I never miss smoking quite as much as I do when I have coffee in front of me.
Ah how I miss standing in the garden at 5.30 in the morning, a cup of instant in one hand and a Marlboro Light in the other…good times.
As far as instants go, I have to say my choice has been, for several years now, Nescafe’s Alta Rica. It’s a good store cupboard staple.
I find things harder when it comes to choosing my fresh coffee though.
I actually have a bit of a penchant for Tim Horton’s coffee. For those not in the know, Tim Horton’s is Canada’s own Starbucks. The original blend is smooth and mellow (much like the Canadians) and cries out for an accompanying doughnut (something with a maple glaze). I rely heavily on imports from my best friend.
It has to be said, I am not the best coffee brewer in the world, but Tim rarely lets me down.
Of course I have to admit that I’ve cut back a lot on my coffee consumption recently. Too many extra shots in my mug have started to make me a little twitchy, I blame it on age.
In fact, and don’t go spreading this around, I’ve been known not to order coffee at all and to go for a Chai tea instead.
A heinous crime I know. But I’m quite sure the coffee trade will survive without my regular contributions.
I’m not sure where this article is going, other than a colleague suggested the title to me, and I really liked it.
Coffee is fuel for the mind but, unlike that which is rising well above the rate of inflation, it’s not going to run out anytime soon.
I shall leave you with one final thought, not an original one I’ll grant, but you can’t talk about coffee and not take this one parting shot:
I like my coffee like I like my men – ground up and in the freezer.
PUBIC HAIR – Where Do You Draw The Bikini Line?
July 19, 2008
It’s a contentious issue, for both men and women. Let me tell you where I am currently in the debate.
Imagine, if you will indulge me for a moment, Sleeping Beauty’s fairytale castle; a triumph of engineering and God’s own eye for beauty. A castle that is encumbered by deep-rooted thorny brambles which block the very passage so many princes have sought to enter. Are you getting a picture?
Let’s just say that without the princes hammering at my castle gates, certain parts of my anatomy have been allowed to go back to nature. I shave my legs and under arms, pluck my eyebrows and wax my top lip. On the whole I am not a hirsute figure of a woman.
Except for Chewbacca between my legs.
Given that the last person to venture down there was my Gynaecologist I figured I’d make him work for a living. Now I’m not saying he needed a hedge strimmer and protective goggles to find his way in, but I’m fairly certain he said something about spotting Bill Oddie down there.
Maybe it’s time to rein nature in for a while.
I’m having an all over spray tan on Friday, in readiness for my annual summer (and invariably rained out) BBQ and bash. Along with various horror stories about waxing that I can’t even bring self to repeat, (Ladies, there are certain times of the month when it is unacceptable to expect someone to wax your bikini line, you know what I’m saying) my beautician told me that I could elect to wear undies or I could bare all.
It’s a struggle to keep me in clothes at the best of times (something I inherited from my father, sadly however I did not inherit his thin gene), I’ve never been bashful about exposing myself. I do however maintain my modesty to protect others. When Michelle told me that she could take it if I could, I knew I would be sporting a tan without the white bits.
It also means I’m going to have to tackle the Bush of Doom, the Thatch of Despair as it has become known.
Do men have this problem?
I am of course referring to the modern ‘metrosexual’ male, the David Beckham’s of this world as it were. Men of for example, my father’s generation (i.e retired), would only under go the razor if they were having a vasectomy. However the popularity of the ‘back, crack and sack’ wax as it is known, appears to be taking off.
A friend’s husband had such a treatment and she was furious. She was repulsed by his newfound baldness. Maybe whipping it all off is a little extreme (how does one even wax testicles? I imagine it to be a little like trying to pull sticky-tape off a blancmange), but when I was with my partner the thought of him having a little trim in the area of his gentlemen vegetables, was quite nice. An unruly thatch, it has to be said, is a little off-putting.
However such thoughts are hypocritical in light of my own 70’s disco afro.
Having now made the decision to tackle it, the question then becomes how much is enough? Should I go for the neat Brazilian landing strip or, as is more likely, the boldness (or should that be baldness?) of the Hollywood.
It has been the case in the past, that once I get started I don’t know when, or indeed where, to stop. Which is fine between you and a loved one, but it’s something else entirely to bare one’s naked pudenda to a virtual stranger.
I think the key here is going to be less is more. A gentle trim all over and some light weeding at the edges…it’s not like it’s going to be on display again once I’ve had the tan applied.
Which actually, now I come to think on it, is a little disappointing and also a waste of tanning spray.
THE X-FILES – PILOT EPISODE
SCENE 4
BELLEFLEUR, OREGON(Driving down a long road, they pass a sign that reads “Welcome to Bellefleur, Oregon.” Scully is reading the files and Mulder is eating sunflower seeds while driving.)
SCULLY: You didn’t mention yesterday, this case has already been investigated.
MULDER: Yeah, the FBI got involved after the first three deaths when local authorities failed to turn up any evidence. Our boys came out here, spent a week, enjoyed the local salmon which, with a little lemon twist, is just to die for, if you’ll pardon the expression. Without explanation, they were called back in. The case was reclassified and buried in the X-Files, till I dug it up last week.
SCULLY: And you found something they didn’t.
MULDER: Mmm. (as if to say “yes.”)
SCULLY: The autopsy reports of the first three victims, show no unidentified marks or tissue samples. But those reports were signed by a different medical examiner than the latest victim.
MULDER: That’s pretty good, Scully.
SCULLY: Better than you expected or better that you hoped?
MULDER: Well… I’ll let you know when we get past the easy part.
(She laughs.)
SCULLY: Is the medical examiner a suspect?
MULDER: We won’t know that until we do a little grave-digging. I’ve arranged to exhume one of the other victims’ bodies to see if we can get a tissue sample to match the girl’s. You’re not squeamish about that kind of thing, are ya?
SCULLY: I don’t know. I’ve never had the pleasure.
(The radio starts flipping through channels rapidly, various sounds blaring. As Mulder tries to adjust it, the clock starts changing as well. The radio becomes a high-pitched screeching and Scully covers her ears. Mulder looks up to the sky.)
What’s going on?
(Mulder pulls the car over to the side of the road and turns it off. He and Scully both get out. Mulder goes to the trunk, moves a briefcase, pulls out a can of pink spray paint, and walks over to where the occurrence began. As Scully watches in wonder, he marks a giant “X” on the ground, then tosses the spray paint can back into his trunk. He moves the briefcase back on top of the can and closes the trunk.
What the hell was that about?
MULDER: Oh, you know… probably nothing.
(He gets back in the car.)
Transcript taken from the X-Files Scripts Archive at www.insidethex.co.uk Used with kind permission.
You don’t really read too much about alien abductions these days; well not unless you read the Sunday Sport or whatever passes for it now. But back in old days (I think of anything from the last century as ‘the old days’) you couldn’t move for reports of some local yokel claiming they’d been abducted by a little grey man and anally probed.
Although to be honest you could achieve the same effect by drinking one too many pints of snake bite at The Angel in Wootton Bassett at the close of the 1980’s.
The X-Files came along in the late nineties and attempted to make sense of it all. Abductions were subtle, stealthy and aliens left sinister devices in your nasal cavities. Radios refused to play, phones refused to work and time was lost. And this all would happen on some dark deserted highway.
I’ve never really been all that into aliens and UFO’s. I just don’t really buy into the whole thing. I mean have you ever noticed how the crop circles only appear when the Universities let out? True story. I once dated a guy who claimed to have made crop circles. He may have just been trying to impress me, but considering Wiltshire gets more than its fair share of crop circles and he was a university student, who was I to doubt him.
The fact that he had a small orange Triumph Spitfire impressed me far more than dragging a plank of wood around corn fields anyway. I think he’s a respected university professor now, or something along those lines. Goes to show you never can tell.
And so I was to remain a sceptic until my own possible abduction last year.
I say possible abduction because I don’t actually remember it…well you wouldn’t, would you?
Actually I’m still a sceptic, it’s just that, well, this thing happened to me…and after sitting and watching Seasons 1-9 of The X-Files on DVD in a very short space of time, I came to the inevitable conclusion that I must be the victim of an alien abduction.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury I offer you exhibit A: The Beckhampton Straits.
Or the A361 from Devizes to Avebury if you really want to break it down. An old Roman road. Long, straightish (apart from the bendy bits) and banked by rape and corn fields on either side. A favourite haunt of the Wiltshire crop circle makers (if you don’t believe me just do a google image search on ‘beckhampton’). But it’s a dark and lonely road at one thirty in the morning, when there are no other cars around.
Many’s the time I’ve remarked to my passenger (on the occasions when I’ve been lucky enough to have one) that this stretch of road is exactly the kind of place where some poor sap is likely to claim they had an extra-terrestrial encounter.
If you’re going to be abducted, it’s going to be at crop circle central in the wee small hours of the morning. Mobile phones rarely work along there, radio reception is poor, CD’s jump and skip in the player and there is nothing in the darkness, except for the odd unlucky fox or rabbit.
And so it was I found myself, at two in the morning, air thick and heavy with fog, travelling relatively slowly (for me) along this deserted highway. The fog was so dense I could see little apart from the road directly in front of my headlights and the road signs as I passed them.
As one travels from Devizes along this stretch of road you approach a large ‘Welcome to Avebury – Historical Town’ type sign. Once you see the sign you know you have an s bend before you hit the straight that leads up to the Beckhampton roundabout. Having travelled this route many times before in the fog I knew my bearings and could navigate quite accurately.
The ‘Avebury’ sign appeared out of the mist and I waited to turn the wheel into the first of the bends. But the turns never came and then suddenly, without warning, the main road sign appeared and I was no more than twenty feet from the roundabout.
I braked hard and crossed it safely, but I was shaken. Where had the bends gone? Where was the long straight that led up to the junction? From the sign to the roundabout had taken a matter of seconds instead of the usual minute. The fog had rendered the road completely straight and hundreds of yards shorter.
I had not thought to look at my watch when I saw the sign, and therefore when I checked the time after hitting the roundabout, I could not tell whether I had ‘lost time’ or not. Besides, had I been abducted by aliens, I’m certain they could’ve returned me to the exact moment I disappeared.
I had lost space as opposed to time. Clearly these were aliens without a TomTom.
Perhaps I was just disorientated by the fog, maybe I was tired and just not paying attention to the road…or maybe I had been taken aboard a spacecraft and poked and prodded in intimate and not-so intimate places.
The whole incident was bemusing but mostly pushed from memory until my Fox Mulder extravaganza. I shared the experience with several people, one of whom had the wherewithal to point out that, had I actually been abducted, surely I would have suffered some terrible flashbacks or dreams about alien probing and spaceships.
I countered this with the fact that I’ve been dreaming about anal probes and aliens and flying saucers from the time I was old enough to understand about aliens and flying saucers. You’ll be relieved to know the anal probes took a little longer.
I have always been a vivid and lucid dreamer, able to extrapolate the finest details from my nocturnal adventures. There was the one, for example, where a rotting zombie allowed me to keep my chewing gum in his jaw bone whilst I was hung on a meat hook and tortured by a pirate over his sheep I had allegedly killed.
To me, alien flashbacks are nothing out of the ordinary. If I was abducted by aliens then I would say the whole thing is heavily over-rated. These people should try answering 999 calls once in a while…now that is an experience that’s out of this world.
WANTED: Cat-loving German housekeeper called Magda – cake baking skills and liberal views on pornography a must.
July 3, 2008
It has to be said that I am, no matter how you try and look at it, deeply disorganised.
“A place for everything and everything in its place” has never really held much sway with me…it’s more a case of “a place for everything but that has something else in its place and the thing from the place has been left lying around on the coffee table for four weeks”.
When you live with someone else, as I did for many years, part of your personality is repressed. Not by you, but by the other member(s) of your household.
My partner would, for example, tidy up after me. If I left a book on the table or a DVD in the player, or even an empty glass by the bedside, it would duly be removed and put in its rightful place.
Eventually I became accustomed to his anal tidying habits and although I never learned to adhere to them, plenty of moaning and nagging persuaded me to at least make an effort to pick up after myself.
I moved into my own house two years ago this month. My spare room is still half full of unpacked boxes and my desktop computer remains in bubble-wrap shoved away in a corner.
As I type this on my blood-stained laptop (seriously, don’t ask) I am surrounded by detritus – junk mail, important mail, computer hardware, video games, books, magazines, notebooks, pens, a pile of exercise books from my first two years of secondary school.
Crap breeds crap. Leave one item alone and untouched on the floor and three days later you will have a pile of objects that includes t-shirts, mobile phone boxes and blank CD’s.
All because there’s no one to make me put it away when I’ve finished using it. Common sense and a need for natural order and balance do not apply here. I am a filth wizard.
This is why I need a housekeeper. I need to be looked after. Not by a man, not in a co-dependant relationship kind of way. But in a firm, matronly manner.
She will be called Magda and she will have grey hair in a bun and large bosom to which she will clasp Lily and call her “meine liebchen”. She will feed me and clean my house and force to pick up after myself. My work shirts will be starched and my shoes will be shined.
Imagine coming home to the smell of baking lebkuchen and warm apple strudel, the scent of orange wood polish and gingerbread in the air. No clutter, mail neatly piled on the table ready to be sorted through. A tidy office where paperwork has a home and important files are easily accessible. Bed made, laundry done, cats fed and loved. I have a dream, and this is it.
Of course back in reality I can barely afford to put petrol in the car never mind hiring a full time household staff member. But all this disappears in a puff of wasted logic whilst I stare vacantly at the dusty television screen, feet on cluttered table and plastic glass of wine in hand.
Actually I do have real wine glasses again, temporarily, but that is a whole other story. This one is about my need for German dictatorship and unconditional love.
No one else is going to be able to stand my mess unless I pay them to. Hence why I shall never co-habit again and also why I am teaching my cats German.
Dear Diary, today I had an egg for my breakfast…
July 1, 2008
I was born in 1972 on the anniversary of the Titanic hitting that iceberg and the Donner Party departing on their (unintentional) gastronomic adventure. An auspicious date you must agree.
I was raised on a diet of old radio comedies and tinned mince with carrot, which probably explains an awful lot that my therapist couldn’t.
I live in Swindon and have no intention of moving anywhere else. And when I say in my bio that where I live is usually on fire, I mean that I live next to a play area where the equipment goes up in flames every four weeks. I’m also a stone’s throw from a subway that is a favourite dumping ground for burning Domino’s pizza mopeds. And then there was the chap a couple of streets over who blew up his flat whilst cooking garlic bread. Or it may have been heroin. Garlic bread is probably a little too exotic for where I live.
But what, I hear you sigh, is the purpose of this blog? Well I simply wanted to put my mark on the internet. Much like a wild animal marking its territory, I am urinating over cyberspace in the hope that some random tom might pick up my scent and join me in some caterwauling.
Actually I’m just trying to get into the habit of writing on a regular basis about things that might actually interest people. Either that or I’m just being another self-indulgent vapid blog whore.
Probably the latter.
Anyway here you will find writings on such topics as black cat sightings, the time I was probably abducted by aliens, German housekeepers, celebrity cat crushes and pubic hair.
All you really need to know is that I am currently single. I am not Bridget Jones, nor do I aspire to be. I am very, very fond of the male form in all its glory and I drive far too fast, as the points on my licence will attest.
And also James May owes me a fiver.
