Apparently all the best weblogs have a Lolcat so obviously mine should have one too.

Duh?

Apparently, in the spirit of protecting us from a new generation of communicable diseases; O2 have started giving away condoms.

I am not sure I think too much of the jokes, but it’s a nice touch.

I had been pretty much ignoring recent milk adverts; after all, Milk is pretty much just Milk unless it is Wiseman’s “The One” which only has 1% fat but tastes pretty much the same as normal 4% milk. (No, this is not a sponsored post I just like the taste and the fact that it is purple).

Anyway,  I saw some of St Ivel’s new Omega-3 milk, reduced to 40p in Tesco last week so I decided that I may as well try it.

St Ivel, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that what milk really needs, is added Omega-3. Of course, being moderately sane I figured that they would make this tasteless but apparently, I was wrong.

The first thing I did with it was to make a Latte - I was still being naive here and I thought the fishy taste was just my imagination but then I had a pint of the stuff, cold and fresh. It tasted like herring in a milk sauce! I am not exaggerating, it really did.

I checked… I didn’t believe it so I took a photo of it because I knew you wouldn’t believe me either. St Ivel got perfectly good milk, straight from a perfectly happy and innocent cow, and then squeezed the innards of a fish into it.

I don’t think I can say any more, this is just madness! Mind you, the cats love it.

** Update: That last statement was a lie, they were just being polite because I was watching them. I just went back into the kitchen and the rest of has been left untouched by a pair of greedy felines who will eat just about anything; alive or dead.

As some of you may know, I have been having a bit of a problem with Mark Wahlberg lately. He has managed to get into my house and he is scuttling around and hiding out in the bathroom. Normally, I wouldn’t really mind but I am not sure why he is here, and it’s a little disconcerting seeing him scuttle off, just on the edge of vision every time you get close to finding him. I can feel those little beady Wahlberg eyes staring at me as I sit on the loo reading, and even as I sit here, typing this entry.

I have made up a sign, so that he knows that I am onto him, but it doesn’t seem to have worked. He’s still here.

There is nothing on the Internets about ridding your house of Mark Wahlberg so I am having to somewhat play this by ear. I am not sure what his natural predators are but I know that Bill Hicks is one. Unfortunately he is dead but then I realised I could just disguise somebody else as Bill Hicks and that may well scare him off. Whilst I am at it, I may as well bring in some more troops, so I got together Mark Harmon, Chuck Norris and MacGyver to command an army. Of course, I have to find them an army, but I have something in mind… I shall make them an army of Jungle Animals and Monkeys!

I present to you… My General Staff.

And, their army:

Tonight they will seek out Mark Whalberg and remove him from my house. I am afraid I cannot post any more details, I have been sworn to secrecy. This is, after all… War!

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!

I have been an inventin’ again Momma.

Today I turned my mind to the issue of car thieves. Contrary to popular opinion, deterring car thieves isn’t a problem; all you have to do is to drive a peice of shit that none of them would be seen dead in. A yellow Citroen AX with a one litre engine is pretty good since they won’t even steal it as a quick ride home, it would generally be quicker to walk. No no, Theft Deterrent is so 20th Century, this century should be all about Theft Retribution.

The idea is so simple, I am amazed all cars don’t have one. All you do is to fit a couple of Magnetrons into the driver’s seat (a magnetron is the thing that cooks things in your microwave oven) at the points where the car thief is in closet contact with the car seat and have it so that unless it is disabled, the magnetrons start up with the car engine. It is a nice cosmic convenience that the most boilable parts of the car thief’s body also happen to be in the places where he is in closest contact with the seat but you could also put one just underneath the scrotum should you be feeling mischevious. I was thinking something like this:

I haven’t done any field tests yet, so I am not sure how quickly the car thief would actually notice their insides being boiled. It may be possible for them to get out of the car before they actually died. One problem I can see is that when they explode in the enclosed space it will be rather messy to clean up but we can address that by putting the devices on a timer linked to a weight sensor on the seat. Nicely cooked, as opposed to completely obliterated. For those readers who are interested in eating the heart of their enemies, this should also be a major selling point.

I shall be approaching companies with my new invention shortly, I can see the letters of thanks and wonder pouring in already!

The Technophobe News, the flagship magazine of The Technophobe Press is now open for business.

That is, it would be if the Editor, Printer, Binder, Distributor and only Author of this rather short lived journal wasn’t quite so terrified of his printer.

It happened yesterday. Previously the offices of The Technophobe Press were inhabited mostly by a comfortable old HP Laser Printer that had formerly been the property of BT and had been thrown away because it was obsolete. Obsolete is a word that the The Technophobe Press like. In our dictionary the entry for Obsolete reads:

ob-so-lete (adj): See Comfortable, Familiar and Useful.

The Technophobe Press were tempted yesterday by the offer of a supposedly obsolete colour laser printer. This offer sounded too good to be true, pretty colours would boost our readership no end and since this printer came with toners, it would save some load on the ageing HP. We were informed that it was large, we didn’t contemplate how large.

The first issue is that the offices of The Technophobe Press only have mortally sized doors. This is not a printer for mortals. The only place it would fit was in the porch so we had to clear away a whole pile of mouse eaten junk to create it a new home. At this point we were already in mild fear of it and wanted it to feel comfortable. A couple of hernias, some broken fingers and a lot of bruises later, The Printer was now settled and had power. Getting a network connection to the porch was a slightly more complicated matter involving moving a hub into there. When you have a hub in the porch, you know things are starting to get ridiculous. To make The Printer feel more at home, we introduced him to some locals, and tried to make him look as in place as possible.

It was time for a test print. After pressing buttons randomlyfor a while, a noise like a small jet engine started to issue from the innards of this beast; it rattled somewhat in the way the Tardis used to rattle back in the days when Dr Who had more comfortable special effects and after a little whine, it started to shoot out sheets of paper faster than should be possible. They weren’t blank sheets of paper, they were all full of tecnical stuff that looked important. At this point, we started to get suspicious that we may have allowed a Trojan Printer into our midst.

After downloading new drivers, setting the IP address and things that are not too complicated, and permissable to us here, we sent a few colour photos to The Printer. The house shook, the Tardis spoke and the colour pictures appeared as if from nowhere. Somewhat curled up but none the less excellent quality. Something that would have taken about 5 minutes on a mere mortal printer.

Now firmly convinced that something was wrong, it was time to search the Interwebs for details of this beastie. The results were shocking. It can print 28 sheets a minute in full colour and just under 40 a minute in black and white. It can take just about any size of paper you throw at it, it can print it on both sides and it has four drums inside it so that it can simulateneously print all the colours at once in a single pass. As if that isn’t enough, it can print its 1st print in less than 10 seconds and can hold over 3,000 sheets of paper inside it.

The staff of The Technophobe Press are now in fear. The porch has become out of bounds because we are scared to breath on it lest one of those hundred zillion parts gets a slight warp and breaks everything inside there. If this happens, it may well cause chaos not just to the porch but to the Universe as a whole. We can see it, on the network staring at us, begging us to use it but so far, we are resisting temptation whilst we ponder our fundamental position on this matter. What if we start to get attached to it and one of the zillion irreplacable parts breaks? Who will look after it? And importantly… What does it eat?

Come to think of it… If it eats mice, it can stay for ever.

The offices of The Technophobe Press will keep you informed. Watch this space.

I had to pop to Canada later that day so the time had come to deal with Neil, who was hanging in the back of my Land Rover making the place a little stinky.

Here he is, and what a fine chap he still is if you ignore the fact he is a little floppy and skanky.

On a closer examination of our patient, it appeared that the injury he had sustained by being hit at high speed by a car had caused some of his spine and various other shattered bones to peirce his skin and make him a little delicate as far as his body went. It didn’t look like plucking him with the skin intact would be that easy but none the less, I tried.

Ok, as you see, it wasn’t a great success. It looked like in this case, the best bet would be to get as many feathers off him and basically gut him and fillet him there and then. He doesn’t need his wings any more though.

With most of the feathers off, it was time to dismember the poor chap and make a start on that rather damaged body. They don’t make it easy.

Ok, now the messy bit - You may want to close your eyes for this bit is you are squeamish. Luckily, you can’t smell it, though in fairness to him he wasn’t too bad.

Finally… As they say on Blue Peter, here’s what your Neil should look like in the end.

And of course there are some leftovers, but they are quite cute really.

I am sure we will see more of Neil later, but for now I have a flight to catch. Bon Voyage! Oh, whilst I am gone, remember to practice the Pheasant Plucking rhyme:

I’m not a pheasant plucker, I’m a pheasant plucker’s son and I’m only plucking pheasants till the pheasant plucker comes.

Ah ha! Look what I found on the way home this morning. I have called him Neil. Isn’t he pretty.

I guess I will have to hang him for a few days and then decide what to do with him. Where is a copy of Hugh’s Meat Book when I need one!