It seems that I now have 59 of the PG-Tips monkeys. That doesn’t include Sidekick, the trusty little monkey of the same family who travels the world with me in the pocket of my rucksack.

To get 59 monkeys, I have had to buy 9,440 tea bags at a cost of about 165 quid. The tea alone takes up a few square metres of space. But hey! They are handmade, and in England too, that’s got to be something right?

For those who have been lucky enough to avoid my monkey obsession, these are the little monkeys being given away with special packs of PG-Tips but he was originally not a PG-Tips monkey, he escaped from the long since failed OnDigital TV Adverts just after they became ITV Digital and crashed horribly, taking Monkey with them. Monkey became a cult advertising hero and for the first time I can think of, another company bought the rights to him and ressurected an advertising campaign for a completely different product. The OnDigital monkeys became quite valuable, selling on eBay for about 100 quid each and for a short time, they made the Sidekick mini-monkeys but that stopped due to licencing problems I think. I have one of those and Carolyn has his only known relative.

http://www.pgtips.co.uk/freemonkey/

For more, and watch the advert, it’s great :) You can find the older adverts on Youtube.

Isn’t he cute! Can you see why I need 60 of them now? I am going to try and get one of those fairground claw machines for them to live in.

I am holding off on publishing the design for MICHAEL’S DEATH MACHINE for a few reasons. Firstly, I am still getting the safety systems for the prototype and secondly because I am not sure I should be responsible for the death of millions of bloggers. It would be a bit pointless having a blog taking the piss out of them if they were all dead and self-parody is so very 1990’s.

Anyway, I figure I owe you something so this week I will present How to Hack a Stanley Yankee Screwdriver in glorious digital kodachrome. The Stanley Yankee is one of those screwdrivers that you push in and it twists itself in the direction that you set; they are useful for doing things without people hearing you, unlike those pesky noisy electric things and they are just generally cool things. One of the problems with the Yankee though is that the bits are expensive and as far as I know there is no interchangeable tip system so - I made one.

The standard flathead bit looked like a good start since it already had a taper in the shaft which would save a little bit of cutting. The aim was to create a tapered 1/4 inch square drive on the end so that a bit changer could be fitted.

Case hardened steel is no match for my Dremel and a sodding great vice! Anyway, it needs cutting off at the neck.

Eventually, with time and some effort, it’ll fall off. Happens to us all in the end. You need to keep this bit in case you were wondering:

You need to taper the end now - Luckily two sides are already done as part of the flathead so just match these up on the other side to make a nice square.

With luck, the 1/4 inch bit will fit onto the end nicely - A bloody big hammer makes it fit better though.

And just to prove it still looks cute - Here’s the end product.

There. Now don’t say I don’t occasionally post something useful!

It seems that I have taken back my pole position on the Slippery Slope of Culinary Decline. At this rate I’ll be back to spending weeks at a time living on instant mashed potato and pizza from bins. On the plus side, I won’t have to work out how to format my food weblog.

I was hungry and I haven’t slept properly for ages, ok? I did cook the toast and butter it myself if that helps. It wasn’t my fault that there was an open tin on the side with some dregs of pink salmon in it and it really didn’t taste bad with mayonnaise and paprika.

Come to think of it, everything was just fine until I saw 2 cats staring up at me wondering why I was eating their supper. Bastards.

I just realised that I have been ignoring one of the most important rules of being a Master Blogger, that of starting postings with the word “So”. In American English I believe this is normally used as a way of saying “Me! Me! It’s my turn to speak and I am butting in. Listen to me now dammit!” but for Master Bloggers, it’s just so. So!

Well… Chavez is back as president of Venezuela, Pinochet is still on his deathbed and Britain is still a nuclear power.

Kofi Annan is still saying that Iraq and a mess, and he wishes he’d done more and Hezbollah is still causing trouble in Lebanon (which oddly, is no longer called The Lebanon). America is still torturing people in prison camps and holding show trials, the British government and security services are alienating Muslim communities just when they need their co-operation most, trains are not running because there is “too much dust” and gyppos are still nicking copper wire from train tracks and electricity substations.

I guess everything is back to 21st Century normal after the little aside of the last couple of weeks; that seems something of a shame. It was fun for a while anyway.

What an odd couple of weeks this has been in England as far as Terrorism and Espionage is concerned.

The first and most obvious event is this whole Alexander Litvinenko poisoning story. A former spy, poisoned by highly radioactive Polonium-210 hidden in his Sushi with a deathbead claim that it was the Russian President wot did it. All this followed by geiger counter weilding policemen finding various signs of Polonium on his trail, in hotels, on British Airways planes and inside the stomachs of a larger than life, publicity seeking Italian Security Expert.

Almost missed in the shadow of this true-life competition for the new Bond Film was Michael Stone’s attack on Stormont (The Northern Irish Parliament). Stone, a very well known Loyalist terrorist from the old days entered the building carrying six to eight “fairly amateurish” bombs, a gun and a knife and was pretty much stopped in the first few seconds by civillian security guards and disarmed. One assumes he will now get 30 years in prison for carrying a knife and a few extra years added on for the other stuff.

Whilst all of this has kept the newspapers and telly amused for hours it has provided a nice little flashback to the times when terrorists were people with proper names and causes that were at least understandable. A time when the Spy Game at least seemed to make some sense and was more concerned with spying on foreign agents than spying on the population as a whole.

It was quite a pleasant flashback, oddly. But I bet it won’t last.