He was waiting outside the back door after we’d been away for months and soon fell back in to his usual routine of attacking towels and coming in and sleeping on our bed. Caroline had wondered if he’s not sure who he belongs to, but I’ve pointed out that he thinks that we and his owner, our neighbour Heidi, all belong to him. His name’s Basil.
Thanks to Shaun for this one:
A Lancashire Farmer is overseeing his animals in a remote part of the County when suddenly a brand-new BMW advances out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a designer suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the farmer, ‘If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?’
The Farmer looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, ‘Reet, why not?’
The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel Spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the farmer and says, ‘You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.’
‘Wow That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,’ says the Farmer. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the boot of his car. Then the farmer says to the young man, ‘Ey Up!, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?’
The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, ‘Okay, why not?’
‘You work for the British Government’, says the farmer.
‘Wow! That’s correct,’ says the yuppie, ‘but how did you guess that?’
‘No guessing required,’ answers the farmer. ‘You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used all kinds of expensive equipment that clearly somebody else paid for, you tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about cows ……. this is a flock of sheep. Now give me back my dog.’
As you all might know the sites Facebook and MySpace are crowded with indie bands, professional musicians and the like. Some of these have contacted me and some have obviously found my weird-ass writing inspirational.
One of the first to contact me (on MySpace, but he’s on Facebook too) was one Miguel Vella (guy with the guitar) and he even came along to one of my signings at Forbidden Planet. He’s now apparently working on a concept track called Jerusalem AI. Love it!
The other one with the freaky hair, called Jazizo Cappucino, based in San Francisco, has already produced a track called Prador Moon.
If you are on either of the sites mentioned you can check out samples of the music.
I recently had a chat with a friend I hadn’t seen for something like a year, as usual we ranted about the madness that seems to surround us. Being a farmer he’s been at the sharp end of some of the EU and NuLabour madness, red tape and endless ridiculous legislation. He told me first about the tax on plastic bale wrap – a disposal tax they must pay whilst still disposing of the wrap in the usual manner, that is, on a fire; or how he, on a family farm, can’t smoke in his tractor whilst it is out in the middle of a field, can’t smoke in their outbuildings and must put up No Smoking signs. The crap list is endless.
I told him about my blog, but he said he didn’t read blogs. He’s read this one now and has said, “Not sure about the photograph, it looks a bit ‘posed’ to me, may I suggest the one below as a replacement?” and provided the picture here.
Noting the body warmer, washed out jeans, silly shoes and lack of grey hair, I’d put this in the Eighties or early Nineties. I suspect it was a Mundon ‘Fun Day’, which usually started from the local pub then ended up there.
Here’s an amusing column from Jeremy Clarkson, but what’s even more amusing is reading the humourless, righteous, blinkered and nutty replies. As one of the saner people there commented:
I must admit that I am truly, truly saddened by the nearly complete lack of anything approaching a sense of humor in so many of the posters. Apparently, vegan diets are disabling that part of people’s brains. Seriously, people, lighten up a bit.
Success! I actually managed to clean out the printer cartridge, refill it and get it all working again (though for how long I don’t know). Really I should confine myself to a monochrome laser printer then I just wouldn’t have such problems. I don’t bother printing off photographs or much else of the like. However, I always like to print off bookmarks like these shown here – a combination of advertising and calling card. There must be thousands of these scattered around the world now.
Y’know, I’m heartily sick of the rip-off printer manufacturers that dominate the market now. I bought an Epson printer some years back which, if I’d bought Epson cartridges, would have cost me £60 a time to refill (5 cartridges at £12 each). However, I bought a kit of refillable cartridges and with much fucking about, inky fingers and the occasional purchase of refilled cartridges on the Internet to get replacement chips – I was reprogramming them and they often went wrong – I did save myself more than three times the cost of the printer itself. But the printer finally died and I had to bin it. My next purchase was a Hewlett Packard. The replacement cost of the one black and one tricolour cartridge for this too is ridiculous, but that’s not a point to belabour since we all know that most printer cartridges retail probably at something like 10,000% of manufacturing cost. I got my colour cartridge refilled at a local computer suppliers (the machine there drilled the holes for me so in future I would know where to inject ink) but, having left the printer alone for six months, the cartridge of course dried up and fucked up. I’m now trying to clean out the printer head holes to get it working again, but don’t hold out much hope. Wouldn’t it be nice if some printer manufacturer produced a printer with refillable reserviors and maybe an extra one for head cleaning fluid? Wouldn’t it be nice if said manufacturer made it so it will print on any paper, rather than its own expensive brand? Wouldn’t it be nice if it was built to last rather than fucking up just after the guarantee ran out? Again this is something I don’t hold out much hope for. So, what I’m after is a printer that doesn’t have its ink cartridges chipped, doesn’t make the printing head integral with the cartridge, has a print head accessible enough to clean, has a transparent cartridge so I can see how much ink is inside and also refill it, doesn’t have software that says, “you’re using cheaper printing supplies therefore I am going to shut down”, doesn’t have a software package that takes hours to load (like the HP), and maybe, just maybe, lasts for a while. Any ideas?
