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fucking overheard

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see evil hear evil speak evil

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ella ella eh eh eh - oh fuck off

so it rained today.
i like the rain.
i seem to be the only person who does.
at the first drip drop, come the first pitter patter up pops a forest of umbrellas, brollies and bumbershoots.

look it is not that i have anything against umbrellas per se, it is that 99% of the time they are carried and used (well misused) by idiots.
summer was bad enough with multitudes wandering the streets not bothering to look where they were going because they were too busy looking at their phones. winter isn't going to change that just add a whole new level of difficultly in walking down the road.

umbrella users have little use or care for other pedestrians.
it is raining and they have to keep dry. so they forge ahead umbrella above their heads. gotta keep dry for that important meeting.
of course they don't pay attention to what is in front of them. it is all full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.
not for them the polite gesture of raising the umbrella as they approach a fellow walker on the street of life, nor the slight tilt of the brolly to move it out of the way. nope. just keep going. hold that sucker firm. let the other person move. hey it's their eye, let them move.

i hate them.
i fucking hate them.

sure i might be ok with rhianna offering to let me stand under her ella ella 
i might be thrilled to watch gene kelly to do his dance in a puddle strewn street where he uses his brolly as a prop.
but i think that is the extent of my umbrellas are ok.

the rest? they should all be burnt.
i think that is reasonable of me. 

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stinking cold

cold is worse. i think this might be full on manflu.
cough, sore throat, runny noses.
yup i have a cold.

looks like it is going to hang around like an invited house guest, or the tory party in power.

it used to be that i didn't mind having a cold as i would just go into work show what a martyr and hero i was by coming into work regardless of the fact that i felt like shit. see, i would be saying by being there, i am dedicated, i am determined, i am the man. i am not sure what the biz buzz words are to describe that sort of behaviour - but i am sure they are all positive.
rather than what they should have been: go home you fucking idiot - you are ill and you are possibly going to make others sick.

my main reason for going in on days that i was buggered by the cold was a semi practical one, at least here i could get others to make me coffee.
i knew i was going to be miserable at work, but i also knew i would have been just as miserable at home - but at least at work i could make other people feel bad as well. i was such a star (or twat - depending on your point of view).
somehow though the very effort of going to work made the cold disappear quicker - probably due to the lack of sympathy i was getting (i can never remember if it is feed or stave a cold of self pity to help the healing process).

now i am not working and i am time rich and can do stuff the cold lingers and lingers and i stay huddled under a duvet drinking water and hoping that tomorrow the cold will go.

bet your bottom dollar it might. (or might not).

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to make matters worse

and just to add to my woes: i have a zit.
it is not one that you can see.
i only realised it was there the other night walking home when the seam of my pants started rubbing against it. not painful, but annoying. it got more annoying with every step, because once you know it is there then everything irritated it, everything rubbed against it. the pants, the coins in my back pocket, the jeans.

i got home, stripped off and had a bit of a feel - well you would, wouldn't you?
braille reading is not a speciality of mine - but these zits (for it was a cluster) were saying 'you can't squeeze us'. by golly they were right. while i could feel them i couldn't get into the right position to give them a good old pinch to extract the puss.

by a complex and complicated arrangement of mirrors i managed to see the offending zits - they looked for all the world to be a representation of the belt of orion - so good that richard branson could use it to launch his commercial space rocket there.

i can feel them.
i can see them.
but i can't squeeze them.
the little buggers are there, they still annoy and irritate. they are not going away.

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i don/t fucking believe it

i don't believe how lazy some of the staff at the tube station can be.
oh look there is some one having some trouble using the ticket barriers. shall i go help them? and by helping them avoid a bottleneck in a busy station?
or shall i stand here looking all studley dudley while propping up the wall.
the wall won.

i don't believe it but i have a cold.
a bona fide dyed in the wool throat tingling chest coughing nose running i am a miserable bastard cold.
and it is not even winter yet.

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with enemies like these who needs friends

been a bit of a tough time for ed miliband - this has not been a glorious summer.
his labour project seems to have stalled. just when it looks like he is making progress something goes wrong.

he hasn't been able to consistently beat cameron in the verbal jousts that are prime minister's questions. for all of that he is seen as someone who has some very good ideas - just unable to convert them into something tangible that the country can understand and rally behind.

perhaps labour's new found pacifism might just be what the doctor ordered. not that it is pacifism - more a case of once bitten twice shy and if we are going to support a war it had better be because we have all our ducks in a line and all the proof is iron clad, but not iron clad small print way that most insurance policies are - because we all know that once we need to claim on a policy they are worth less than the cheap toilet paper we use.

so labour have called for 'compelling proof'. this has meant that david cameron has had to pull back from doing his blair heir impression.
this is not a bad thing. (secretly you have to think that cameron is going to send ed a bunch of roses and a thank you note).

back when all this sort of discussion was over iraq i was supportive of regime change because it was obvious that saddam hussein was a pretty nice piece of work.
while the same can be said of bashar al-assad in syria yet this time i don't think we should go near it with the shitty end of a very long shitty stick.
why?

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i gotta book ta sell ain't i

the nation's favourite mockney chef has been at it again.
he's only gone and written another bleedin' book. it is guaranteed to be a best seller and to clog up the shelves at a supermarket near you.

it isn't enough that he sells it to the middle class who populate their kitchens with unopened and unread cookbooks (i would like to say this is very bizarre behaviour - but as my collection of unopened and unread art books testify it is an easy trap to fall into), he also wants to get others to buy it. 

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want to ride it where i like

a bunch of caveats before i begin.
no death should be celebrated, especially those that are needless and avoidable.
no instance of bodily harm should be celebrated especially those that are needless and avoidable.
cycling is good for the individual and great for the environment.

i never had a bike when i was a kid (boo hoo me).
i did learn to ride one (yay me) i just never did it very often.
there was a brief time when i was a gym junkie when i had thoughts of taking up cycling as a sport but that quickly died a death. talk about bad timing this was before cycling became the golden sport of britain - not that i would have been any good - just that the gold dust would have rubbed off on me (maybe).

so i don't have a helmet.
i don't have hi-viz jacket/top.
i don't have lights front and back.

nor do i ride ridiculously fast on crowded pavements while on my mobile.
or ride in the dark on the roads in black clothing with no lights.

this morning i was about to cross the road.
the light was in my favour, the beeping was telling me and several others it was safe for us to cross and this was the time to cross. cars had stopped.
people were crossing the road.
cyclist just rode through us all, only just avoiding hitting a few people.
thanks mr/ cyclist.

every day i see examples of bad cycling and of inconsiderate cyclists.

the roads should be safe places for cyclists but i think it is time that advocates of cycling and those who campaign to make it safer start addressing the more fundamental problem of the fact that so many cyclists seem more than happy to chance injury and death because they are too cool for helmets and lights.

if i am honest i am surprised there are not more of them who are in intensive care. 

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purged, lost and not coming back

the tendency of computer and internet based companies to want all their services and offerings to be interlinked and interconnected has caused one of my mates to come a cropper.
they had just bought a new laptop.
that meant windows 8.
in order to set up windows 8 they had to create a msn profile, in doing this they were asked about their previous hotmail account. they gave the wrong answer and old hotmail account has gone to that place in the internet heaven (no not the cloud).

funny thing is something similar happened to me recently. an attempt was made to hack my account.
that locked me out of my hotmail account for a few days.
eventually msn looked into my claim and lo and behold i was back using hotmail.
yay me.

so that is what i suggested to my mate.
it didn't work.

how odd i thought.

then i started noticing that i was getting things pop up on facebook that related to searches i had done on bing for stuff, or had been the result of me opening an email  (the email is not linked to facebook). a nice bit of data mining going on there.

this all ties in with the recent, and on going, hoohah about the internet, trolls and such like, and privacy and security, snowden, manning and miranda to name a few.
it might have been because i have grown up reading spy novels and watching spy movies that i wasn't all that surprised at the revelation that the state spies on us. i was more surprised that people thought that this was shocking news.

based on the recent conversations about the police and security services were going to be able to access when it came to people's emails and such like i had confidently told my friend that there would be no problem in getting the hotmail account back. just report it and they will resolve it.
simple.

not so.

on further reading once you delete a hotmail account all the data of that account is purged from the system. all gone. just like that.
gone.
gone.
gone.

so my friend has lost all their contacts and emails of many years.
hotmail are saying they can't do anything about it.

i wonder if the security services are aware of this? looks like all you need to do is get a hotmail account write your nasty dangerous email - send it and then delete your account and you are safe.
that seems to be what msn are telling us.

it is either that or they just can't be asked to help a distressed user who has made a mistake because of the overly complicated way that msn tries to link everything together.

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the world has gone mad

several months back i was reading an article about a plan to tow icebergs from the arctic and use them to irrigate various desert lands. it all sounded plausible. it all sounded exciting.
the one stumbling block to the whole thing was the cost. to test whether or not it was feasible the bod in charge thought it might cost £10 million.
that seems like a lot of money.
in the great scheme of things it is just a (ahem) drop in the ocean, especially when you consider that footballers are sold for more than that every transfer window. or when you consider how much qatar are prepared to spend in order to host the world cup.

i was reminded of this when i saw the story of the parking space in hyde park gardens. i do hope that the story is a hoax and that like everyone else (well the beeb) i have fallen for it.
(by the way and as an aside have you seen the hyde park one development - the luxury super flats? crikey but they are as ugly as sin. the only people who could love them are those who have so much money they don't care what anyone thinks)

so a parking space is up for sale.
£300,000.
a 91-year lease, that's ok then.
it is worth that much because parking is at a premium in that area.

given the location is close to several tube stations and bus routes you could argue that there is no need for parking.
the rich are not like the rest of us and so would never travel on public transport.
at £300,000 it is probably cheaper to just get a taxi every time you wanted to go somewhere.

it is nice to know that there is someone who has that much spare cash to park their car. i am sure some of that money will trickle down into the local economy and help fuel the recovery. though i am not sure just how well that trickle down theory of the rich spending money and the rest of us benefiting from their crumbs is actually holding up.

£300k is a lot of cash to most of us. instead of doing something useful and interesting with it someone is going to spend it in order to park their flash car.
if ever there was a sign that the world is going mad that has to be it. 

can't help hoping it gets clamped.

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