LostJohnnies.com

Rich: Worst Driver 2009

2010-08-22T14:08:39Z

It's been a long time coming...

Sorry! I was going to post this in December last year, as with years previously, but I hadn't quite made up my mind yet.

But now the nominations are in, for worst driver of 2009!!

Nomination 1: BMW Drivers

It wouldn't really be a worst driver competition without our old friend the Beemer driver. Also known as Notorius Knobheadicus....

(Wrong pedal, mate...)

And the worst one of all... (there are other people in the world too y'know. Stop acting like a self-obsessed little c**t!)....

Nomination 2: Nissan Note Drivers

It has become apparent that Nissan's 'Note', halfway between a people carrier and a hatchback/city car type thing hasn't done what it was supposed to do: get all the elderly drivers and put them in a common type of car, so we can avoid them like the plague. Instead, the Note has been attractive to both elderly drivers and a subset of young charver scum.

(Charver, incidentally, is the proper word for 'chav'. Charver originated in the North East of England - where I come from - and was popularised by Jimmy Nail's character 'Oz' in the comedy series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet).

And the young drivers are even worse than the silver-haired ones!!

Nomination 3: Bandwagon Audi Drivers

This is a hard one for me to even suggest. I'm a devout Audian. I get pleasurable chills when I see Audi R8s on the road, I often shriek "audi!" when driving around and I spot a particularly nice one... but being an Audi driver isn't what it used to be.

My problem is, I've liked Audi since "before they were famous", and then they became popular. Like most things that jump from cult status to mainstream, lots of people jump on the bandwagon and ruin the image. Jeremy Clarkson knows this, and unfortunately, so do I.

Audi drivers nowadays are mostly tossers. But not all of them. You can tell the tossers from the original cult fans because the cultists are a bit more subtle. Spoilers are an absolute no-no, the S-Line body kit tends to use gentle creases in the bodywork to suggest a spoiler, but newbies to the marque will stick an actual spoiler on. Which... spoils it.

Engine sizes are important too. The original fans will be happy to lug about huge A6s on a 2-litre diesel engine, satisfied with the fact that their superior interiors and excellent ride quality will breeze them where they need to go without the need for excessive revving or shows of poweerrrrrrrr! Those new to Audi will pick the 2.5TDi, because bigger is better, to them, although they appear to be compensating for... something? The glorious A5 is only marred by those that have chosen the 2.7TDi.

Now this is where it gets interesting, because the 3.0-litre turbo diesel is another favourite of cultists, not the new fans. The 3.0TDi engine is Audi's secret weapon, and those 'in the know' choose it because they 'know' it offers better real-world performance/economy than the 2.7TDi, but those not in the know assume the 2.7TDi is "only 0.3 worse" and will be cheaper to run.

Not true.

And it's not just me and Clarkson who think this either...

Anyway, enough rambling and justifying my current car purchase. Audi drivers are now on the block...

And the winner (loser?) is....

(scroll down a bit.... we have to keep the suspense up somehow...)

35mph Drivers!!!!!

That's right, those annoying drivers who hold you up in 40mph zones by doing 35mph constantly. Then, when you get to a 30 zone, they STILL do 35mph so they end up pulling away from you (naturally, doing the speed limit) and getting to their destination first!!!!

Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!

We'll be seeing you in just a few months for worst driver 2010!

Rich: Stupid is as Stupid Does.

2010-06-15T13:14:03Z

And I Stupid Did.

I am a muppet. I am stupid. I am thick. There's no other way of putting it. Last Thursday my IQ dropped by 100%, just as I was trying to buy fuel.

Thursday lunchtime I had nipped out at lunchtime to get my ears lowered (hair cut), buy a sweatshirt, and then get a Boots meal deal.

Actually, on that subject, t'other half and me were discussing those crazy Germans. You know, they call your nipple a Brustwarze, quite literally a "breast wart". Crazy crazy Germans... And we're no better.... why the hell do we call thin-ish jumpers sweatshirts? They're neither shirts nor designed to be sweated into. It's quite a disgusting name. It would be akin to calling jeans 'urine shorts'.

After my visit to the barbers and shops I headed back to work, as I arrived to work the small team of invisible electronic goblins in my car alerted me to the fact that I only had 15 miles of fuel remaining. Fortunately, I work just up the road from a Shell station so that night after work I popped in, drove up to a pump, got out, and grabbed the pump handle gun thingy. The machine clicked to say that the bloke in the petrol station (with whom I was about to get well acquainted) had kindly acknowledged my existence and that the pump would work. I then noticed the pump actually had a 'pay at the pump' system too. A brief fiddling with it, trying to get it to work, replacing the pump gun bit thingy (what the hell do you call that?) and still it just kept saying "Pay at Pump Unavailable". So I brimmed my tanks with lovely diesel and wandered towards the petrol station to pay for it.

Inside, I mooched around looking for the special offers, nothing took my fancy so I just went to pay.

"Seventy seven pounds, sixty four pence," said the bloke.

A little piece of me died inside.

I pulled out my wallet, flipped it open and then pulled out my... my... hang on.... er...

Shit.

Where's my card?!

Arghh!

"I think I've left my card in Boots at lunchtime," I explain to the bloke, panicking. "Have you got a Yellow Pages?"

Some random bloke behind the counter, he said he didn't work there (he could have been robbing the place, but I don't think robbers wear high visibility jackets) passed me the Ochre Tome and I flicked to Boots' number. I got through to their upstairs section.

"Hello, you're speaking to," I can't remember her name, "in Boots Photography, how can I help?"

"Hi," I said, "I think I left my debit card in your machine at lunchtime! Has it been found?"

"One second, I work upstairs, I'll go down..."

Wa-hey.

A brief pause followed... I stood in the petrol station looking a bit awkward, wondering which hoodie-wearing little hoodlum was charging little annoying mini motorbikes to my card. Gradually building up a plan of intensely brutal revenge involving sharp sticks, and waterboarding, and ropes, and an enormous, "Oh hiya, any luck?"

"I'm afraid not, sorry!"

Bugger. I hang up.

"It's not there," I tell the bloke behind the counter. He issues me with important looking triplicate forms which I fill out all my details on. I have 7 days to return to the petrol station to pay the money, or else Shell will hunt me down like a hidden finger buffet at a fat bird's birthday party. I apologise, and sheepishly head out to my car.

I pull away and immediately remember that I went to buy my sweatshirt after Boots. I pull off to one side, next to the Shell garage's car wash, and grab the receipt out the bag, I dial the number and a woman answers.

"Hello."

"Hi, I think I left my debit card in your machine at lunchtime?"

"Oh, I'm upstairs, I'll go downstairs and find out."

There was a pause. What is it with phones being upstairs in shops? God, if it's not there, I'm going to have to ring my bank, find out what's been charged to it, and then cancel it. God, this is going to be bad... Then there was a huge brightly coloured man at my window knocking.

It was the improperly-atired thief from inside the garage obviously come to steal my car too. Always being a sucker for politeness, I get out.

"We've found your card."

Astonished, not only that my card had been found, but that the thief was doing a really, really piss-poor job of car-jacking me, I followed him back into the station.

There was my card, in the hand of the bloke I tried to pay only moments before.

"Where was it?"

"Was it in the card machine? How did I miss that!"

"Had it fallen out my wallet?"

I had so many questions.

"No," said Shell employee man. "You left it in the pump outside."

Bollocks. Of course!

My earlier "fiddling with the Pay at Pump thing" included slotting my card into the pump.

At this point I hung up on the woman in the sweatshirt shop, not having had my phone near my head for some time now.

So I got my card back, I had people running around in shops all over the, um, shop, and I paid the extortionate amount of money for some go-go-juice for the Audi.

And the saviour of the day? It was the bloke who pulled up behind me at the pump after my dismal attempt at purchasing fuel: none other than a Jaaaaaaaaag driver.

Thank you Mr Jag driver. Sorry woman in Boots photography department. And sorry to the woman upstairs at the sweatshirt shop. And sorry to the bloke in the petrol station who didn't get paid... then eventually got paid. And sorry to the polite thief in the high vis jacket for making him run after me when the card was found.

And sorry to Shell for wasting your triplicate stationery unnecessarily. I hope you don't go bust over it xxx.

Rich: Lost - The End is Nigh!

2010-05-23T12:50:10Z

An analysis of Lost the night before the finale is broadcast

I hate Lost.

I hate Lost with a passion. It is the single most frustrating piece of television ever devised.

I watched the first series with the twinkly-eyed naivety of a young child capturing sight of Santa in their local shopping centre. It promised so much - on-going mystery, writing the likes we'd never seen before, compelling characters, evil characters, and the odd sprinkling of sexy.

The second series answered little and posed many more questions about 'The Island' and its inhabitants. The third series was more of the same. It genuinely felt like the writers had enough plot to fill one season, but then the programme was picked up internationally and they were forced to write a further 6 series. Looking back, it still reeks of a single-season plot strung out for six (the usual American philosophy of seven-series-long programmes being dumped in favour of a six series plot due to a frustrated public outcry).

So how will it end?

Well, the writers aren't all that smart, and anybody who's tried to write any fiction themselves should recognise the blatant implementations of standard fictional techniques. This gives us a good starting point to make an educated guess.

First, I firmly believe most of the people on the island will return home. This forms part of the 'interrupted journey' mechanism that fiction writers use. For example:

Johnny left the house and headed towards the supermarket. He needed condoms and whisky for the party that very evening. Suddenly, as he was passing a bank, masked robbers ran into him and knocked him down. The money went flying. There was a squeal of Police siren just along the road in clear response to the silent alarm inside the bank.

Deciding that retreat was the best part of valour, the robbers climbed into their beat-up Ford Anglia penniless and drove off in a cloud of pre-Thatcher era engine oil.

The Police arrived and immediately took Johnny to the Police station, it became quickly clear that he was a suspect in the robbery. After all, he was surrounded by money on the pavement outside the bank!

An hour of fruitless interrogation later, the taped conversation was interrupted by a senior Policeman who barged into the room without ceremony.

"Let 'im go, Bob. We caught the thieves, he's clean. CCTV says he was just passing."

The Police apologised and offered Johnny a lift home.

"That would be great," said Johnny. "But can we go via Sainsburys? I need some condoms and whisky."

And sure enough, Johnny got his condoms and whisky, and that night the party was excellent.

See, it makes for an interesting-ish (sorry, I wrote that on the fly) story, and leaves that character 'goal' of getting prophylactics and booze in the minds of the reader quite clearly throughout the tale.

I fear this is what the whole ethos of the Lost story is based on at a very high level.

The writers have also employed your standard Shock and Awe© tactics too to try and keep the viewer on their toes. Killing Charlie off, for instance. And John Locke too! He's been killed shitloads of times... And this is why I say only 'most' people will leave safely and get home.

I understand Jack has taken claim to the Island's 'heart' so it makes sense that he remains behind, but what if somebody else jumps into his place at the last moment? I suspect Hurley will be the one to do that, perhaps trying to beat the curse by being nice to the Island or something? I'm not entirely sure. Or perhaps Hurley will be one of the ones killed during the escape from the island.

And I do genuinely mean an escape, how else do you finish a programme about being stuck on an island in an intense and shocking manner unless it's a race against time and a race for life?

Lost has always brought parallels to William Golding's Lord of the Flies and it only seems right to honour that immortal text by giving a nod to the way that book ends in the way Lost will end too.

I'm not talking about the prim-and-proper Navy man on the beach, as much as that would be an interesting way to finish, that would be too much of a copy. We already have our different factions on the Island, and we know who the principal characters are that we want to get off the Island (particularly Kate...), and we know from watching Swordfish that the general public like a happy ending otherwise they don't feel fulfilled by a product, so it is definitely going to end 'happily', and that appears to point towards a mass exodus off the island - at least, for those that want to.

And this is another good point. Jacob has said these people were chosen because they didn't have families, they didn't have brilliantly happy lives etc... do all of them really want to leave the exotic island where their troubles are far behind them?

I think there will be surprises in store around who actually wants to go and who would rather stay.

The show as a whole is ridiculous, it's a drawn out painful process that should have been concluded at least a season ago. But as a technical exercise in writing and creativity, it's quite epic.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow to see how it ends and which of my predictions are proven and which are bollocks.

Lost? I'm completely bewildered!

G: Its Business Time

2010-05-20T20:11:47Z

Again...

Well once again my playlist in the car, work and at home has been playing a lot of Flight of the Conchords music. The top 5 are Business Time, Think About It, Bowie, Leggy Blonde and The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room.

Mix in the odd Tim Minchin track and it gives me a smile all day long - along with a unhealthy and warped out look on well everything. Still ace tunes though.

Rich: 103

2010-05-17T12:58:34Z

The Number of the Beast! Possibly.

Donkeys years ago, before I became the libertarian anarchist I am today, I used to live in a house numbered '103'. In 1990 my family left that house behind and moved into new domiciles. But the number '103' wasn't finished with us yet.

If you've seen the film '23' starring Jim Carrey, it's much the same story for me, only my face isn't quite as rubbery.

*checks, subtly...*

There was even a brief omen of what was to come while we still lived in that house. I was only a toddler at the time, and my parents were out enjoying themselves (not at a Tapas bar.... too soon?) while my grandparents kept an eye on me. That evening (or so the original story goes) a Libyan terrorist stuck a bomb on a 747 which tragically exploded. Approximately the same time, my mum (who has been known to have strange psychic abilities*, much to the anger of my natural sceptic attitudes) had an instant panic attack and visions of hurt related to the number '103' and they drove home immediately to check on me.

House 103, and its residents, were fine. Pan American flight 103, however, was not. It was lying in Lockerbie.

There have been numerous other encounters with '103' since.

Most recently, during my brief flutter with being a Civilian Instructor for the Air Training Corps, the guy I spent a bit of time learning the ropes with was part of the 103rd in the Territorial Army.

Our trip to Rome in April involved a few hours pottering around the Vatican City during which our guide introduced us to Justin Martyr, one of the first Christian writers and philosophers. Martyr was born in the year 103.

And last week, a double-barrelled bit of spooky coincidence happened when a Libyan plane crashed in Tripoli. You can understand I wasn't surprised that the death toll was 103.

I'm just waiting for the next recurrence of 103 in my life, hopefully it wont be related to plane crashes.

Maybe a lottery win? Although hopefully it will have a few zeroes on the end.

*Incidentally, (According to my dad) mum often wakes up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, adamant that the Earth's poles have switched round. If birds start flying north for the winter, you heard it here first, folks.

Rich: Away Mission To Rome - Day One

2010-04-19T21:46:39Z

Where Stuff is Big! And Really, Really Old!

Do you ever look down at your feet while lying in bed and think "wow, that's how that's going to look on the gurney when I'm dead"?

Well, being a nervous flier, that's the gear my mind changes into a few days before blasting across the sky in a pressurised tube at 80% the speed of sound. This time, we were jetting to that city of ancient history, Rome! Or, 'Roma' as the locals call it. Poor sods, dyslexia must be rife on The Old Boot.

Anyway, taking off from the airport was fine, we climbed out into gorgeous blue skies and spent two hours cruising through the smoothest air Europe has ever seen.

"As we have started our descent into Ciampino airport, please ensure all seats and tray-tables are in their upright and locked positions..."

We descended through a layer of clouds where Italian air-traffic control decided to keep us, bouncing around in the water-sodden air. Not too bad, but enough to make the nervous fliers in our levitating can start getting... well, nervous. Five minutes of being treated to Latin turbulence and we began to descend further. Italian ATC stopped us in between two layers of clouds, we had a stunning, and quite opaque overcast of white above us, and a heart-stoppingly black undercast of cloud beneath us, sizzling with sparks of electricity.

And we were in an Airbus... the �electric jet�... Stories of our obvious and unstoppable demise flashed through my head like a newspaper montage in a film; comparisons were already being made to Air France 447 , and Airbuses would ultimately never be allowed to fly into anything but the most benign of weather. The European aviation industry would be in tatters. Boeing would, once again, reign supreme...

We dipped our shining white fuselage into the black soup and instantly we were hurled into a world of hurt. One mother returning from the toilet with her toddler clutched against her chest hit the deck and held on for dear life while the craft around her began to buck and wobble. The nervous fliers on the plane started to apologise for the smell.

For thirty minutes the aircraft was silent. Sorry, I mean the people on the aircraft were silent. The aircraft was noisy as buggery, creaking and straining as we side-slipped in the dense clouds. The engines were a screaming sine-wave oscillating between high pitched full-thrust and silent-against-the-windy-onslaught idle speed, trying to combat the acceleration and deceleration effect of the wind currents within the cloud.

Then the lightning started... was that the light on the wing flashing? FLASH! FLASH! BANG-FLASH! One of those wasn�t the wingtip strobes...

After several years of flying inside a rodeo bull, the clouds began to fade and the metropolis of Rome decloaked. It was windy all the way down and we were shook up like an Elvis Presley song, but eventually we were crossing the runway threshold (probably a bit sideways) and the tyres slid onto the asphalt with expert precision.

Pilots are super-human. I have enormous respect for their uncanny abilities to land 100-ton tubes on slick, wind-blown runways with the accuracy of a biathlon athlete doing the shooty bit.

And we were down. Sunny, warm Roma! Ciao, bella! Or not as it turned out. The doors of the Easyjet A319 were opened and the temperature dropped instantly, the howling wind whipped around the apertures. We ran down the stair cases off the jet and into the terminal as fast as we could, through torrential rain and gales.

I considered asking the pilots if they hadn�t just landed back in England, but remembered the weather in England was spectacular...

We got our cases, said hello to some friends who had also caught the same flight, and then headed off to locate our hotel. We didn�t have an airport transfer so this bit was down to us. We knew we were at least 45 minutes outside of Rome; a city we�d never been to before, and we had no idea of its layout or how the public transport system worked. This was either going to be hilarious fun, or a catastrophic nightmare which left us mugged, dead or worse.

We hopped on a bus to Anagnina, because a bloke at the bus stop told us that was where the metro was, and we knew there was some kind of metro station running to our destination suburb. �1.20 for the 25 minute bus ride (cheap at any [exchange] rate).

Anagnina bus stop at 10pm is like a horror film. Empty, desolate bus stop with nobody around, the wind whistling through the columns holding up an old metal roof. Our only escape was down into the subway to find our Metro train.

The metro wasn�t much better. We came down the stairs (still hoiking a great big suitcase around) to find a rusting old tram mounted on a grassy pedestal. During this day this would have made a heart-warming and delightful homage to days of old, where people and transport were simpler and more primitive. However, soaking with rain, windswept, tired, thousands of miles from home, with a vague destination, wind howling through the openings... it was spooky as hell.

We found the line, and a �1.00, 11-stop Metro ride later we ended up �near� our hotel. Or at least, we recognised the name of the roundabout we ended up at... The roundabout with five or six similarly-named streets on it, stretching away as far as the eye can see. And the eye can see even less in a violent hurricane. Whilst carrying luggage.

Surprisingly, however, and in complete disregard of Sod�s Law, we managed to find our hotel a mere few hundred yards up the second street (called a �Via� in Italian... don�t say we never teach you anything!). By now it was getting late, the rain had added 100kg each to the weight of our clothes, and we�d spent more than forty minutes on public transport (27 minutes is my usual limit).

We checked in, and pretty soon, were asleep atop high-volume, hotel-quality bed linen.

It was soon pretty obvious that Rome is a very special place. Like Jerusalem (I assume, I�ve never been) and Beijing (also never been), and probably several other similarly unique places, Rome is one of those places where you can�t take a shit without defecating on something that every historically important character for the past three millennia has done so already.

But first, of course: breakfast!

Am I the only one concerned about protocol and procedure when eating in foreign countries? Once you leave our supposedly-multi-cultural island and head off to �the continent� it is incredible having French, Italian, Spanish, German, Belgian families all talking across dining tables in an Esperanto-esque blend of languages. My concern is always around eating � our hotel offered a pleasant and diverse breakfast buffet: danishes, croissants, cereals, fruit salad, yoghurts and fromage frais, little bread buns (like really, really small bread buns??) and a plethora or cheeses and meats. What is the procedure for eating this stuff? Can I go back for seconds if I like something? Is there a flow-chart somewhere that shows you must start with cereal, then a croissant, then something made of meat and cheese....?

To avoid offence to the other hotel patrons I limited what I ate from the breakfast buffet; I would soon regret this.

We headed off for the Metro (we knew where this was from the previous night!) and bought a three-day pass at the low-low cost of �11.00 each! This would give us unrestricted access to Rome�s many public transport systems and would grant us the ability to randomly end up at the Colloseum late one night on a whim (more on that later). We got the Metro four stops to �Termini�, the main bus, rail and Metro terminus in Rome, from there it was a brief walk to La Colloseo according to our maps. Brill.

The Metro was empty, it was Easter Monday so people were still asleep while the tourists roamed. We pulled into the station to a monotonous bloke saying �Termini... Sinistro!�. This meant you had to get off the left hand side of the train... while looking sinister... (that bit�s a lie). Termini was pleasant enough, there was a Lindt chocolate shop, an Italian Marines surplus shop selling used aircraft carriers (another lie, sorry) and navy-branded clothing. We skipped past this and headed for the door, outside and straight away learned the splendid way that you cross the road in Italy: with immensely large balls of steel.

Our guide book states: �cross the road while looking directly at any approaching traffic. Look confident and slightly angry. Do not change your speed!�

Do not change my speed? What happens if I change my speed??! It took two days for the meaning of this to become obvious when slowing down mid-crossing caused a moped (which, if we hadn�t slowed, would have perfectly missed us in an act of mounted motorised precision unlike anything you�ve ever seen before) to nearly careen into us and resulting in much beeping of a feeble horn.

We crossed the road outside of Termini and headed off in the direction of what we soon discovered was nothing. Sweet F.A. Nada.

We checked our map, turned around and with a little help from the digital compass on my phone we made our way to the Colloseum. En route we went inside the National Art Gallery but it was �7.50 each entry! That was two days worth of Metro usage! How na�ve we were, Rome wasn�t the cheap country our first 12 hours in the country had led us to believe. 30 hours later we would be sitting in a bar to escape more torrential rain opting for an �8.00 cup of tea instead of an �11.00 pint of Heineken! You can buy a family saloon car in Bulgaria for eleven Euros! But for now, we were snubbing a seven Euro trip around probably a brilliant art gallery.

Walking to the Colloseum we quickly realised that the reason Rome wasn�t built in a day was because of all the hills. All of them nicely decorated with great bloody big stony steps that hadn�t been maintained since Julius Caesar knocked about them parts. After half a mile, we were knackered. Rome, despite being cheap (so we thought), was exhausting. We walked down a street which seemed to lead only to a Metro station and a pleasant archway and then the Colloseum jumped out at us. Just like that.

�Rar!�

It said. Definitely one of those breath-taking moments. I�ve seen the Colloseum before, it was on Friends and it�s in that �when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie� song music video, but it�s always weird being there. I remember going to Cape Canaveral as a kid and seeing their Saturn V rocket in a hangar there. Just looking up into the five enormous rockets on the first stage, hiking the full height (well, length I suppose as it was lying flat, suspended in the air...) and being actually tired by the time I got to the pointy end. Amazing stuff. The sheer size of it! And it was the same with the Gladiator bowl. Such an enormous piece of architecture, of design and most impressively, of construction. Even today we struggle to build stuff that big (think New Wembley?). The Romans were awesome, well ahead of their time.

We pottered around the area outside the Colloseum then wandered over to Titus� arch. (Hehehe... Titus...) The queue to get into the big Italian superdome was enormous, so we decided against going in. We continued to walk around and peered into the Roman Forum through big heavy (modern!) metal gates. It looked quite spectacular.

We wandered along in the direction of the north-west towards a very impressive and gleaming white building built on top of a hill. On the way I was dead impressed to see some solid-gold statues just lining the pavement.

I was less impressed when it leapt out at some unsuspecting tourists.

The great big white building surrounded by columns � which must have been cheap way-back-when because they were bloody everywhere � was the National War Museum (if my Italian translation abilities are up to anything), inside it was chocked full of dead-old (no pun intended!) guns and helmets and stuff. Quite good, but not as good as it would have been if it wasn�t surrounded by epic buildings and stuff. More to the point, INSIDE one of those epic buildings. We quickly left so we could have another look from the outside. We weren�t disappointed. There�s a great set of stairs at the front of the building with a (I�ve ran out of synonyms, sorry) big soldier mounted on a horse on a big pedestal thing. For miles around it seemed it was white and full of more columns! Everywhere! Columns!!

Before long, we were half a mile away and headed towards the infamous Pantheon, the oldest thing in Rome, so I was told. 2,100 years old!! I found that hard to believe though, there was a bloke who passed us that very morning who looked older than that.

The Pantheon was a weird building, round, enormous (isn�t everything in Rome?!) and with... well, it obviously was built by cowboys. They hadn�t finished the roof. A huge hole was letting the sunlight drift in (the sun hadn�t played much of a part in this holiday, in fact we were still in waterproof coats!). Apparently in the rain people flock to see the rain fall through the roof.

Mentalists.

And you�d have thought after 2,100 years somebody would have botched up a half decent roof; got Raphael to paint somebody on it, maybe? Or one of the other Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

We left the Pantheon and got our first taste of the famous ice cream. A rather expensive (we thought) �3.00 ice cream pot gave The Wife a pot of chocolate a pistachio, and I had mint and chocolate.

More walking led us past more amazingly architected buildings and we stumbled upon La Fonta di Trevi. Also known as the Trevi Fountain. Or, I suspect in reality, the Trevor Fountain; Italy�s mocking tribute to TVR-founder Trevor Wilkinson who passed away in June 2008.

It looked pretty old too, like.

After this, we headed into Barberini, named after a ~~men�s hair dresser~~ barbarian from sometime yonks ago. Naturally. From Barberini we headed uphill and stopped in for a Panini somewhere. Panini, so it seems, just means �sandwich�. Which is confusing. And a beer.

We wandered up to La Trinita dei Monti, not to be mistaken for La Trinita Del Monte, which is a grapefruit, pineapple and orange fruit salad. (That�s something I just made up).

Next to the church of the man from Del Monte, there was a gorgeous Maserati GranSport, brand new, in dark blue, with enormous wheels. Lush!

We went looking for an English Tearoom we heard about called Bobbingtons or something like that. Wandering down some steps (more bloody steps!!) we found it and went to look at the menu. They were charging �16.50 for a cup of tea and a scone, so we decided against it. Later on, we found out we�d just walked down the Spanish Steps. It was a little disappointing not to have noticed.

Finally, we decided to go find some food! Proper food! It was on Via Nazionale, the road of the Nazis, that we stopped in to a little franchise place. Everything you�ve heard about Italians being laid back is wrong. We were in, quaffed a carafe of rojo vino, had some pizza (rather nice), and were booted back out into the street just in time to watch the sun begin to dip behind the big buildings. Our waterproof coats were still on, but because the chill had set in... One Metro ride later and we were back at the hotel enjoying some in-room Sky TV (Sky News, as it happens, not the pay-per view!). Breakfast was in a mere 7 hours away, so we went to sleep!

Rich: Dear Gordon Brown, You Owe Me Lots of Money.

2010-03-16T13:31:59Z

... You one eyed Scottish idiot...

If I started a business offering, lets say, cabbages, all shapes and sizes, lovely cabbages, but whenever somebody ordered one of my splendid green cabbages from my wonderful and very expensive marketing literature I delivered to them a small wind-up penguin toy, I don't think my business would last for very long. And yet this is exactly what the British Government is doing every single day.

Only... without the wind up penguins or cabbages.

If you are a motorist, you already know that the Government thinks you are lower than pond scum but so many of you are unaware just how blatantly that Gordon "I'm not in it for the fame and fortune" Brown is stealing money from you.

He is for all intents and purposes smashing your windows, climbing into your home, rummaging through your trouser pockets, and leaving with all the notes and coins he can find.

Taken out of context and proportion? I don't think so. Let me give you another realistic analogy.

Lets say you bump into my car at the supermarket. Obviously I would have to kill you in a most brutal way, my car is my most prized possession, but once the blood had stopped flowing, we would need to exchange insurance details.

But what if, when contacting your insurance company, I explained that instead of driving into me at 5mph and causing an unpleasant cosmetic scratch on my bumper you had drove into me at 219mph with a large plastic container filled with jet fuel on the front of your car, laughing maniacally, the collision causing an explosion so violent that I was killed seven times and most of England was wiped off the planet in the fireball.

I don't think even the insurance companies are that shit at their jobs (although possibly... I will explain in my next blog!).

I would be expected to prove my claims before expecting your insurers to give me an enormous windfall so I could buy that Boeing 747 I have my eye on. So why is the Government exempt from this?

And by 'this' I mean proving things that they say and then charging based on that.

Let me remind you of a word you'll not have heard for at least twelve months:

GLOBAL WARMING.

It's difficult to convince a nation that they're causing unprecented heating of the planet when they have just spent the last three months in one of the coldest winters on record. So the Political Spin Machine went into 'intensive wash' mode (I've just bought a washing machine so I am currently an expert in appliance terminology) and came up with a genius rebranding of Global Warming. After the rebrand, their product (and make no mistake, this is purely a political product, it doesn't exist as I will show you in a moment) was renamed 'Climate Change'.

Oh dear! Not a changing climate!!!

Mr Brown, Mr Brown. I am fully aware of climate change.

IT. IS. CALLED. SEASONS.

For ****'s sake...

He must honestly think that he is governing California.

And this is where it starts to hit home. Where it gets personal, and where One Eyed Gordy starts rummaging through your Levis. You are being taxed as a motorist now based on the CO2 output of your car. This is because the Government has linked your CO2 output to another long-forgotten scare-mongering term:

THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT

All the politicians need to do is keep reminding us of something to feel guilty of. "You're destroying the planet!", "Your car is killing squirrels!!!", "Range Rovers are Evil!".

Go and suck on a tailpipe, Mr Brown. That is all lies, lies, lies, lies. To me, if my Greenhouse was causing snow to fall on my tomato plants for three months over winter, I'd want to know what was wrong with it!! The owner of a Toyota Prius should be getting taxed just as much as Range Rover man. In fact, they should be taxed MORE for having a lack of fashion sense and driving a car that looks like it's been in a hideous rear-end shunt.

Let me show you what the last 1,000 years looked like from a climate perspective:

(Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/30/crugate_analysis/page2.html)

Notice the first 400 years of the second millennium was rather warmer than today. And I don't recall reading about any V8 Supercharged Viking longboats.... do you?

But now, figures are being based on the work of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University. This work has been highly discredited and there are sites out there that are combing through the source code (which was leaked onto the interwebs) that CRU are using for their predictions which are coming up with very, very scary findings. One example:

From the file data4alps.pro: "IMPORTANT NOTE: The data after 1960 should not be used. The tree-ring density' records tend to show a decline after 1960 relative to the summer temperature in many high-latitude locations. In this data set this "decline" has been artificially removed in an ad-hoc way, and this means that data after 1960 no longer represent tree-ring density variations, but have been modified to look more like the observed temperatures."

CRU have made comments in their source code that backs up even the most cynical of suspicions that their figures have been more than horrible massaged. Some of the source even goes further and introduces enormous artificial peaks and troughs into the numbers...

James in the comments says that in the file pl_decline.pro the code seems to be reducing temperatures in the 1930s and then adding a parabola to the 1990s. I don't think you need me to tell you what this means.

(Source: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/23/the-code.html)

So all the claims from the Government is bollocks as it is based on figures that are even more bollocks.

And right now, we are being taxed based on figures that are bollocks.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a whole truckload of bollocks.

The reason I'm not writing about my God-awful experiences with my car insurance company this time round, instead choosing to give Gordo another kick in his stupid one-eyed ribs, is because yesterday I was informed of another stealth tax on fuel. Remember when VAT dropped to 15% from 17.5%? Well, Gordon added 2.5% duty to fuel so it would stay the same price, and Labour would get just as much tax on it.

And do you remember in January 2010 when VAT went back up to 17.5%? YOu'd expect that additional duty on fuel to vanish too wouldn't you? Well, surprise surprise, it hasn't. And another rise is being announced soon.

Don't they understand that none of us have any money anymore because of their complete mishandling of the recession?!!!!

And why are they so happy to pour �740 billion into banks, but for schools and hospitals (the reason the Government says we are paying taxes) are having their budgets cut and spending turned down?!!!

You can't get medical attention or an education in a bank, Mr Brown!

I would be very surprised to see what they would do if every single person in Britain decided to stop paying their taxes, all at the same time. That's a 23% pay rise for everybody in the nation. Sure, you'd have to chip in to repair your street when it got pot-holey, and you'd have to join BUPA for when your arm falls off, but you'd not be supporting bank managers who are happy to give out enormous bonuses just because "we didn't do quite as crap as we did last year, boys!"

Jesus, that isn't how you run a country.

So, should we all say that from June 2010 we'll just not pay any taxes and then see how One Eye responds? We can't all be thrown in prison, they're already full of people wrongly imprisoned under the Terrorism Act! He'll have to engage the people who elected him into power (oh, hang on, no we didn't did we), and then commit to answering our concerns about why he favours banks over health and education in his short-sighted (and blinkered?) way.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE!!!!

I've got a horrible feeling I'm going to be locked up for leveraging my freedom of speech.

But next time the Government promises you good health and education but delivers you a wind up penguin with the Royal Bank of Scotland logo on the side, then you only have yourself to blame.

Anybody for a cabbage?

Rich: Choosing a Ferrari

2010-02-24T13:21:19Z

I'll take the red one today Jeeves...

My favourite cars in descending order are:

1. Koenigsegg CCX-R
2. Aston Martin DBS
3. Audi R8 V10
4. Audi RS5 (announced this week)
5. Nissan GT-R

Or at least, they were until about three months ago when I first capped eyes on what Ferrari had been up to lately.

But before I get onto that, I pose you a challenge: if somebody said you could have any Ferrari of your choice, for life, purely for the purposes of driving it and being seen driving it, and without the prospect of "selling it to buy a couple of Audi R8s", which one would it be?

That is a very difficult choice, but my choice has just made the top spot of my favourite cars...

I fell in love with the Ferrari brand (but never the F1 team....) when I first saw the F355 Berlinetta. I was knee-high to a grass-hopper and probably had my first semi rigid experience to that car...

I wasn't too fussed by the F40 (although everybody who's had the chance to drive one says that's their favourite Ferrari car by far) but I adored the F50...

That is stunning. No doubt about it.

Then Ferrari lost it, I can't stand the F360, it's awful. It's too rounded, too feminine, there's no bullishness to the design and it's all very safe. Even with a Hamann bodykit on it. Also, dare I say it, it looks a bit.... well.... fat?

Not a fan. The F430 corrected some of the F360 wrongs. It's more lithe, has much nicer looking front wing air intakes, and teh overall styling is much neater, a bit more masculine...

But it's still not perfect is it.

There have been some variations on those themes, the F360 Challenge Stradale was a 360 on Slim Fast with some go-faster bits, but it was still the F360 so no thankyou. The F430 Scuderia was fantastic, but too hard for everyday use.

There were also some low-volume cars that sprung forth from the Ferrari stable in Modena....

The Enzo (of course) - not a fan in pink, actually, not really a fan at all, it's trying far far too hard, there's too much effort going on:

There was a blink-and-you've-missed-it car built for a very rich Middle Eastern businessman, a totally one-off called the P4/5 which I really quite like the look of...

But then they sold out to the Yanks. Somebody, somewhere, thought they would derail the reputation of Ferrari by asking for a 'soft, fluffy, everyday Ferrari'. Well I'm sorry but that's just not cricket and Ferrari aren't Twinings (Jesus, how more English could that sentence be?). Asking Ferrari for an 'everyday tea' is just pathetic. You'd not ask James Cameron for an everyday Avatar, or Gordon Brown for an everyday tax hike because those things require time to develop and prepare. Each one should be it's own free-standing event. Just like getting into your own Ferrari.

But the Italians relented, and their bastard love child slipped from their Wizard's sleeve to a frosty reception...

Urggggh.

Ferrari had to do something to make up for the California. It knew it had to make amends...

And by God, it did.

Their latest release is a mix of absolute beauty, engineering perfection, and total lack of compromise. This is a Ferrari for car people. Not for Californian Marketing executives who can't see their dashboard because they have a pizza perched between their ample stomach and the top of the steering wheel.

My top favourite car is now.....

The Ferrari F458 Italia....

Can you blame me? :0)

Rich: Underage Sex Can Be Good for the Economy

2010-01-23T17:02:26Z

and some stuff about cars...

In the beginning, and for the sake of brevity, there were only two types of cars in the whole world.

There were Land Rovers...

and there were Ford Focuseseses.

And life was good. The Focuseses would hang about with the other Focuseses, there would be great parties in honour of the Great Blue Oval from which they were spawned. There was much Focus-on-Focus action, and shortly along came the pitter-patter of a fuel injected 1 litre Fiesta.

Bless.

And the Land Rovers would have the parties in honour of the great green oval from which they had been borned. And inevitably, some Land Rover on Land Rover action occured but because they were the mighty Spartan-esque Land Rovers, the result was only a slightly-less-macho Land Rover...

Because they have phenomenally macho genes or something.

Stay with me, I do have a point.

But then one day, a Focus strayed away from the rest of the heard at exactly the same time as a Land Rover (possibly a Discovery) strayed away and they met in the darkest of nights. Both pissed as farts from all the partying.

And they got it on, and Marvin Gaye sung, and there were fireworks.

After a gestation period of several months a baby was born from this meeting...

Looking slightly sheepish, and trying to find its legs...

But rather than casting out the abonination, the blue oval and the green oval rejoiced and received many revenues!

And then BMW got in on the scene... It had cloned the Land Rover's DNA and with a bit of tweaking it came out with the X5...

Which strangely was only bought by people with the word 'banker' in their job titles.

Similarly so, BMW had also cloned the DNA of the Focuseses, stretched it, and filled it with toys to produce the BMW 3 Series...

But again, this was only bought by complete bankers.

Upon seeing the success of the Land Rover / Focus baby, the Freelander, BMW demanded a piece of the action too, so they wined and dined a X5 and a BMW 3 series, and sure enough, a few months later, the X3 was born to its slightly-dirty-feeling parents...

But that wasn't bought by anybody. At least not by anybody with sense.

The X3 was the bastard lovechild of two bastard lovechildren, each generation driven by spite and greed.

Being sensible, the blue and green ovals stopped mating their different-sized generations for fear of polluting the gene pool too much.

They sensibly decided that merging a car and an off roader to produce a 'soft roader' was enough meddling, and allowed for enough of a fine-grained purchase decision to end it all there.

But the angry, greedy spiteful people at BMW stil wanted their own success.

They waited until two 3-series had mated and a 1-series was born...

BMW then immediately kidnapped the 1-series and forced it into underage sexual acts with a new-born baby X3, sickening acts were performed that each baby vehicle were too young to understand.

All in the name of creating a niche in the market.

But sure enough (as automotive anatomy is a bit funny that way) there was a baby born several months later that was neither car nor soft roader.

BMW had produced the X1...

And everybody was forced to look at BMW with suspicious sideways glances, as if they'd just forced babies to mate or something...

Personally, I think it was something in the German water, as not even Audi (my favouritest brand in the entire world) were immune from this interbreeding of generations...

We had already seen what happened when a Land Rover and an Audi had secretly mated, the mighty Audi Allroad was the result...

And then they mated the All Road with a Land Rover to produce the Q7, a vulgar but purposeful off roader...

But then the interbreeding continued, resulting in the Q5...

(yes, that isn't the same as the Q7...)

And some more interbreeding of babies naturally gave us the Q3...

Now, though, Audi have announced they have been making even more babies have sex and the Q1 is on its way....

And you know something...I like it.

It's obviously already been getting its end away with a A3 because the Audi A1 has also recently been announced...

and that's a cute looking car (the Fiestas better watch out!!)

And Audi's DNA tweaking is obviously infinitely better than BMWs because they have even mentioned a Speedster version of the A1...

Yes please...

So the morale of the story is this: you can make babies have sex, and sometimes this is wrong. But other times when babies have sex, they have babies that are the Audi A1 Speedster. And only then is it right.

Rob: 9/11 - We Want The Truth

2010-01-20T23:11:47Z

What really happened that tragic day?

Hi all and happy new year.

I've decided to take a bit of time between writing my next best seller to tackle a few conspiracy theories on behalf of LostJonnies. Where better to start than probably the most convincing of them all - What Really Happened on September the 11th 2001? As far as conspiracy theories go this has to be the one that will run and run until a number of disturbing irregularities are cleared up.

I don't intent this article to be disrespecful in any way to the thousands of tragic souls who lost their life that terrible, terrible day. I will never forget 11/9/01 as long as I will live, I was working at the DSS in Longbenton, Newcastle in a Data Entry job when someone stood up and told us all to tune the radio on our walkmans on - something was happening in America. I left work at 3.30pm and walked along to the bus station, as I passed the bookmakers I saw the images of the burning World Trade Centres on the TV and the awful reality of the situation hit me like a sledgehammer.

I don't intend this to be a poorly wrote...I mean written,poorly researched, biased commentary of what I want you to believe, instead I am going to list just some of the many, many questions that truely need to be addressed, and I will give you a couple of pieces of information to consider when you attempt to answer them for yourself - then you can make your own mind up as to who was responsible for what happened that day.

How did the aircraft that struck the two towers of the WTC and the Pentagon succeed?

- FAA standard operating procedure would be that any aircraft that strayed from it's strictly plotted course, or failed to respond to air traffic control would be considered an emergency situation, and the FAA would immediately notify the NMCC in the Pentagon and NORAD, F-15 would immediately be scrambled from the nearest base and can intercept hijacked aircraft anywhere within American airspace in a matter of minutes. However on 9/11 not one fighter jet was scrambled to intercept the following three flights until AFTER the Pentagon was attacked.
- Flight 11 struck the North Tower at 8:46, 32 minutes after it had stopped responding to air traffic control.
- Flight 175 struck the South Tower at 9.03, 21 minutes after the hijackers turned off the radio and transponder.
- Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9.38, 52 minutes after it went significantly off course.

How did the North and South Tower of the WTC Collapse?

- Of course you'd imagine the impact of the crashed aircraft and the gallons of aviation fuel that will have flooded the building will have contributed to the buildings collapse. However, steel only melts at a temperature of 1,500 degrees celcius, and aviation fuel burns at around half the necessary temperature. Prior to 9/11 a steel framed building had never collapsed due to fire.
- Witnesses and fire fighters reporter a series of explosions as the building collapsed, this corresponds with seismic data recorded at a university 21 miles away, reaching 2.3 on the richter scale with intervals that would tie in with a controlled explosion.
- Why was the steel from the towers removed before it could be examined?

Why did WTC-7 collapse?

- Yes, a third building collapsed. Another steel structured building that was not struck by any aircraft but collapsed at 5.20pm. It collapsed from the bottom in a matter of seconds in a manner which screams controlled explosion.

Why didn't the Pentagon's own defense system take down Flight 77?

- The Pentagon's anti missle batteries sees any missle or aircraft flying within the vicinity of the Pentagon as friendly or hostile, to appear friendly it must contain a specific transponder, when Flight 77 passed, the defense system should have shot the huge Boeing 757 down but didn't react.

Was it actually Flight 77 that Struck the Pentagon?

- Check out the photographs of the damage and make up your own mind.

George W Bush's behavior at the time of the attacks?

- George W Bush was at a well publicised reading exercise with children at a school in Florida when the attacks began, when he learned of the attacks why wasn't he ushered to safety? How could him and his security staff be so sure he wasn't a target? He simply carried on listening to the children read.

How were the hijackers idenfied so quickly?

- Mohammed Atta was named as one of the hikackers yet his bag was supposedly checked it at Miami airport, but for unknown reasons wasn't put on the flight. When the bag was opened it was said to contain his uniform, a book on how to fly planes and his last will and testament. Why would anyone put their will into a bag that they knew was going to be put onto an aircraft that was going to be flown into a building?
- None of the 19 named hijackers appeared on the passenger lists that UA and AA gave to CNN, so how were they identified by US authorities within 2 days of the terror attacks?

Who has gained the most from the attacks?

- In the year prior to the attacks the Bush administration said that the process of transforming the US into 'tommorow's dominant force' was likely to be a long one in the absence of 'some catastrophic and catalysing event like a new Pearl Harbour'.

Well in 9/11 that's exactly what they got.

Rich: 2009 is Dead! Long live 2010!

2010-01-13T13:58:53Z

But still no flying car

2010 came in with a whimper everywhere except in Australia. What has been coined as 'Y2K.1' struck a bank in the upside down land which caused thousands of chip 'n' pin machines to believe it was 2016... thus rendering the Castlemaine XXXX drinkers' cards useless as the system claimed they had expired.

Of course, as everybody knows, we're all going to die in 2012 anyway (John Cusack said so) so this is doubly stupid; of course that is if we assume that this is actually 2010. And the evidence suggests it isn't... My favourite lunchtime toilet fodder is El Reg, a science and technology news site, and they say it might actually be 2015. Or 2014. Or 2006...

And it's probably April.

But assuming this is actually January 2010, it still isn't the 'end of the decade' because there wasn't a Year 0, anyway. The end of the decade comes in 11 and a half months time! Then we begin 2011 (or the 1st year of the 201x decade as the name suggests!!).

Ten years ago, if you'd been asked what life in 2010 looked like you would have been completely wrong. Why? Because it's exactly the frickin' same... only with iPhones. And we have a lot less money. And no supersonic commercial airliners.

Computers are still frustrating beasts. Linux still isn't popular. Apple is still buoyed by its cult prestige and one or two actually commercial products.

Cars are still here burning oil and killing squirrels, despite the better efforts of the big auto companies.

The good things? Well, there's not a lot of good happened in the noughties. 9/11 (or 'September 11th') happened. Several wars between Western nations and middle eastern countries were waged without proper reason and loads of people died unnecessarily. George Bush Jr was re-elected proving the US should NOT be allowed a nuclear arsenal.

The UK jumped from the frying pan into the fire as Tony Blair left Number Ten in favour of a less traumatising job (running around the middle east with a giant beaming target on his arm) and ~~Great~~ Britain was left with some 'one eyed Scottish idiot' who clearly hasn't got a clue.

Adverts on telly went from being remotely intelligent to dumbed down "GO COMPARE!!!!!" abominations. (Although I do like the compare the meerkats one...).

Food didn't change at all, although we haven't had any BSE outbreaks that I know of. Foot and mouth, yes.

"The British motoring industry" is now a past tense phrase.

Parkinson hung up his hat, as did Wogan. The BBC classics are now gone.

Top Gear. Actually that's a good point. Was Top Gear the only good thing about 2000-2009?

Like me, loyal followers of the show have been all over the world with the TG crew this decade. I've seen deserts in Africa, rainforests in South America, tunnels through Italian mountains, and I've been to the magnetic North Pole.

How sad is that. That's the decade that was; the best thing about ten years, 3652 days, was three blokes cocking about with cars...

Oh, and a Russian meerkat with oligarchical tendencies....

G: Controversy

2009-12-14T13:15:05Z

Radio 4 & I

Well it has been quite some time since my last post. There are many reasons for this, but none that really excuse it so apologies for that. That said, I now have something worth saying. Driving to work today I was listening to Radio 4 (something I am finding myself doing more and more as it is not as lame as we young people seem to think it is). Anyway I find some of their interviews very good, and feel Radio 4 at least is wholly justifiable in the eyes of the licence fee payer (of which I am one).

Anyway there was a wealth of controversy beamed across the airwaves this morning. From the British Army Chaplin who said you have to admire the Taliban for the dedication to their faith. Now this has largely been taken out of context, and was said immediately after a statement claiming no one could find any part of the Taliban�s regime that could be supported. Now I actually tend to agree with his comments. It is true that they have taken a rather warped view of their religious texts, and an obvious tendency towards violence along with them. However, it is also true that they have done this because they believe it is what their God wants. Now I realise any act of violence portrayed under the pretence of religion is somewhat far of the intended mark of whichever parable or passage they are quoting, but history reflects times in all cultures when they have taken the Lord�s name and used it as justification for an act of war, the Crusades being a particularly large and prevalent example in British history. Now let me reiterate I despise the methods and actions of the Taliban, but I do respect the British army for trying to understand their motivations. It has even been uttered quietly that talks with the Taliban may be the only way to resolve the war we are currently in. Indeed, during the IRA conflict many thought a peaceful resolution could not be met, but here, decades on we see a peace, uneasy at times but certainly preferred to the activities that marred an otherwise beautiful land for so long.

Further controversy was caused when former Prime Minister Tony Blair issued a statement saying he still would have taken us to war in Iraq if there was NOT an issue of Weapons of Mass destruction. Now I know war is a terrible thing, and that there are a lot of accusations on it being an Oil war flying around, but the undeniable truth is that the world has removed a tyrant from power. If no weapons of mass destructions existed, it does not make him any less likely to use them if he did ever manage to build them. Surely someone in power who freely admitted a desire to build a WMD arsenal, with a proven track record of heinous and unspeakable acts towards humanity is someone that should be held to task sooner rather than later. I always find it curious if you kill a man you are a murderer but if you kill hundreds of thousands you are a political figure head.

The loss of life in the Iraq war is a terrible loss (for both sides), and the obvious supply issues a tragic failing from our Government to aid the very men who fight to maintain our way of life, but the act of war itself, and the justice that followed once again has and is establishing an uneasy peace. Is it perfect... no but it is change. The war on Terror in all its forms is a necessary evil. Edmund Burke summed it up perfectly with his famous quote - �All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.� How can we pretend to be a civilized nation, if we do nothing when all that stands between us and uncivilized acts is an expanse of water? If their oil is good enough to burn in our engines, and homes, then there lives should equally be worth saving!

That said, I hope every one who reads this, of any religion or atheist standing has a nice Christmas, and a happy new year. Maybe 2010 will see some events that shape the outcome of our current controversial issues and paves the way for peace!

Rich: Living Up to Sterotypes

2009-12-13T23:17:10Z

Inside every fat person... is a Twix.

Stereotypes keep life predictable.

I know without even looking that when I'm stuck in a long queue of traffic, that car whizzing down the empty outside lane with its indicator on, trying to push into my lane, will either be a BMW or a 1999 Vauxhall Astra in silver driven by a twenty-something bloke in a beanie hat.

I know without looking that anybody with Manager in their job title will not be able to talk more than a few words without spouting buzzword bullshit at me. I honestly, genuinely, do not care about your synergy. No, nor your blue sky thinking, and I have no interest in the dynamics of your ducks.

Just say what you mean FFS.

And I know, without looking, that every fat person is on the hunt for their next meal, even though they've either just had one, or are still finishing off one.

God, I hate fat people.

If you think I'm being unfair I ask you this - next time you're walking up a supermarket aisle and you walk to one side to ensure that the foot-traffic remains bi-directional, make a note of the stature of the person who waddles up the middle of the aisle bumping into everybody on the way and swinging their lard-filled basket like it is a weapon.

They will be a fatty.

Next time you're cut up by a driver not through haste, but through stupidity or lack of care, I promise you, it will be a lapsed member of Fat Losers watching the road over the crimped crust of a Cornish Pasty.

And finally, if you're finishing shopping at your local shopping centre as I was last week and you're heading for the door to the car park, take extra care...

I was walking in a straight line towards the doors, clearly in a rush as I was on my lunch hour and not making any ambiguous direction changes. A bloke looking like the bastard love child of Elvis during the Burger Days and John Prescott walks in carrying the obligatory pie.

He's not looking where he's going. He seemed transfixed on something just beyond the fleshy mass that made up his right shoulder.

I keep walking expecting some kind of glance in his direction of travel...

Any second now, I try and convince myself as we continue to converge... he's going to look at me, realise I'm in his way (and that I'm not edible) and will evade me with all the grace of an elderly uncle trying to dance after dinner on Christmas.

But he will evade me...

Wont he...?

Oh God...

The distance between us dwindles and I am forced to take evasive action as he still remains totally engrossed in his shoulder.

Diving to the right, his left, I swing my shopping against the wall in the hope it will pull me away from his enormous gravitational moobs pull.

It works too, just.

"Oi, watch it, tubby," I say with all the political correctness of Prince Philip.

But then I see it, positioned just to the right as you walk in the door from the car park.

...A chocolate vending machine.

The fat f*cker couldn't tear his cholestrolly-charged eyeballs away from the frickin' refridgerated Kit Kat box for even a second.

It's not the Government that makes this country so crap.

It's all the fat people!!!

Rich: It's 2009 for Christsakes, where's my Flying Car?

2009-10-20T22:59:33Z

Uhhhh, but you can keep the weird tinfoil boiler suit...

You will have noticed, as I have, that not even that source of all things engineeringly wonderful (Audi) have brought out something that takes you to work in the morning at 3,000 feet.

So if we want to get to work at 3,000 ft, we either have to be a Certified Flight Instructor, own a microlight (and, um, work somewhere with a half decent sized lawn), or drive a plane near the Hudson last February... although you'll not be at 3,000ft for long...

Is anybody else still amazed that thing survived a landing on water at 150mph?

And on that subject, I'm obsessed with planes, and with good right. I'd love to be obsessed with the latest Audi hovering saloon car thing, but instead I must content myself with giant metallic paraffin budgies owned by huge faceless corporations.

So this blog is me proving to you that's it's not all boring white British Airways jumbo jets - there's lots of weird and wonderful stuff out there, and some of it is fookin' hilarious.

For example, Hugh Heffner's plane looks like a giant black phallus...

How cool is that!

Sometimes the most interesting planes are the least obvious... you know what this is, climbing out of Las Vegas's McCarran International?

Every morning half a dozen of these things take off, and pretend to head east to the Tonopah Test Range.... but instead, they head south(ish) and land at that giant realm of secretness, Area 51!

Those are the infamous Janet flights...

Rumours about extraterrestrial pilots are unconfirmed.

You know Iron Maiden? That awesome metal band from the decades before I was born (I'm not as old as you look...) well, lead singer, Bruce Dickinson, has a very interesting looking office these days.

And there's not even a Newton's ball in sight...

This is Ed Force One, the Azureus 757 that Iron Maiden leased for their 2008 tour. Azureus is the airline that Bruce actually flies for when not touring with t'band.

So what about the weird and wonderfuls?

Ever wonder why the engines on a plane are mounted UNDER the wings?

Well, they're not always, take the Fokker VFW-614 for example...

It wasn't very successful. Probably cos it looks bloody strange.

Ever wondered what a plane looks like without paint?

Now you know!

Did you ever know that Concorde had a very tasty sponsor?

Although it didn't last long. And it was only on the Air France ones, not the British Airways ones. :-(

Speaking of interesting paint jobs, Alaska Airlines has a bloke with a giant afro on its tail!!!

Or maybe it's an eskimo in a fur coat...

Is there a more friendly looking livery than Southwest?

Ever wonder what happens to the first-built planes? No... I suspect that's probably just in the brains of plane geeks like me...

This monstrosity is the first Boeing 767. Rather than being saved for posterity like most of the Boeing products, it was ripped apart by the US Army / NASA and had a giant reconnaissance head tumour installed.

And now it's in the desert rotting. Such a pity. :-(

The first 757 (which was made at the same time as its bubble headed sister has a farrrrr more interesting role.

You know the F-22 stealth fighter thingy?

That is a cool aircraft. But they're testing bits of it on the original 757...

Which is cool and a bit of a waste at the same time...

Note the pointy fighter-jet nose!

Hey. You know John Travolta? He was in some little movie in the 80's called Grease (or was it the 70s?). And in the 90's he flew a B-2 Spirit in Broken Arrow alongside Christian Slater...

You can see (sort of) the low-profile B-2 in the middle of that image.

Although this is what it looks like in a plan view...

That is a bad-ass aircraft!

Well, Travolta took some flying lessons and bought himself a little plane...

Or three...

His Gulfstream II...

His L-1329 Jetstream...

Oh, did I mention he bought something small so he can keep it on his driveway?

Yup... the sod's only bought himself an ex-QANTAS Boeing 707 for his family's summer holidays round-the-world trips...

Yup that's all his...

Oh bugger off John...

(Jealous? Me? No....)

Actually he used to own a Connie too:

If you like planes, Connies are like the holy grail.

On the subject of big private jets, did you know the President of the United States actually owns two 'Air Force One' planes? Tail numbers 28000 and 29000.

And it's not actually called Air Force One. Air Force One is ANY US Air Force plane that the Prez is on.

Here's the birds at Prestwick in Scotland!

And finally, you know The Offspring?

Well, lead singer/guitarist/song writer (who also has a Masters degree in molecular biology or something - it's lucky nobody likes a smart arse) also flies...

He even flies in the Jet Races at Reno!

His plane is also a Jet (impressive, if a bit pale in comparison to Travolta's beasty.

Although Travolta's retro QANTAS livery can't quite hold a candle to Dexter's aawwwwwwsome 'ANARCHY' symbol on his vertical stabiliser (fin, tail, thing).

With all this knowledge of flying stuff, we still can't make flying cars?

How utterly devastating.

Plane Geek, over and out.

Rich: The Greatest Software Sins Ever Committed

2009-10-09T13:19:25Z

And some ill-disguised finger pointing at the Big Software Co's....

Software is something that was once the produce of people with collossal beards who lived in dark rooms, wore sandals, and looked down their glasses-adorned noses at the proles who didn't even know simple two's-complement binary arithmetic.

But now everybody's at it, and some are getting it completely wrong. Somebody needs to lay down the ground rules for software and it might as well be me.

Sin #1: Oi! Give me my focus back

A piece of software should never EVER EVER EVER steal the focus from another. EVER.

I mean never. EVER.

The point of 'focus' is that I am FOCUSSING on a particular task, so I couldn't give two flying expletives about anything else right now. Flash the task in the taskbar, but do not, under any circumstances, pop up in front of the work I'm doing because you will be instantly uninstalled and replaced with something that doesn't mince around like it owns the bleeding place.

Microsoft Windows does this A LOT. Even with the Tweak UI Powertool installed and the "Don't steal the bloody focus no matter what, OK?!" firmly ticked in blood and signed in vitreous jelly.

Just the other day I was copying some files in the background while working on a word document, mid-way through the copy operation a window popped up asking if I wanted to overwrite something that I REALLY didn't want to overwrite. However, in the document I was writing the next character I was typing was 'A'... those who know their Windows standard dialogs (you saddo bastards, you) will realise what happened next. I inadvertently used the shortcut key for 'Overwrite absolutely everything, everything you find, overwrite it!!'.

Which isn't what I wanted to do... I only wanted to type 'A'.

So don't EVER steal focus from other applications. I don't care if you're a 'Nearby Nuclear Power Station Impending Meltdown Alarm Application' - there are better ways of alerting somebody to their inevitable doom (or if you've just found another file that's also called Readme.txt).

Sin #2: Stop using modal dialogs when they stop you doing critical tasks!!

Windows Media Player is now in its 11 iteration - ELEVENTH!!!! For expletive's sake people, do you know what the Apollo project did in its eleventh iteration? THAT'S RIGHT! IT TOOK MEN SAFELY TO THE MOON AND BACK! And you can't even get your bastarding media player to work properly.

Dear lord.

Just today I opened up Windows Media Player ELEVEN and dragged my Music folder onto it. Then what happened?

As it was copying my big pile of legitimate MP3s a window pops up with 'Working....' on it. Wonderful. Any point in this? Can't you just show them loading like Winamp does? No. Apparently. It can't.

Instead what it chooses to do, is start the loudest and most heavy-metallest of my music collection (turned up to 11), the shock waves from my headphones turn the little bones in my ears that allow me to hear to dust, and then melts my brain to the point that the only emotion that I can now express is severe hatred of software (did you notice?).

Windows Media Player kindly has a volume slider thingy on it. Before my eyeballs melt too, I remedially click on the volume slider and try to turn down the mus--

*BING*

I said... I tried to turn down the...

*BING*

Arrghh

*BING* *BING* *BING*

The OHMYFREAKINGHELLGODJESUSCRAPPINGBASTARDS dialog that is still "Working" on importing my music collection is modal therefore preventing me from using ANY of the controls on WMP11.

And causing my head to melt from the inside.

DONT EVER DO THIS AGAIN MICROSOFT OR I WILL COME TO REDMOND AND PLAY RAMMSTEIN TURNED UP TO 11 THOUSAND UNTIL YOUR EARS BLEED TOO!!!!!!!!!

And you owe me a new head. This one is broken.

And quite angry.

Sin #3: If you have one purpose in life, BE VERY GOOD AT IT

Recently Firefox (my favourite browser) has been occassionally doing something weird on Facebook. It loads Facebook but refuses to recognise the fact that the page is littered with hyperlinks (you know, those things that THE INTERNET IS MADE OUT OF?!?!?!) and refuses to let me click on anything let alone turn my cursor into a little pointy finger thing.

If you're a browser, then let me BROWSE like a pro.

If you're a Media Player, then be a bloody brilliant Media Player, if you're iTunes, then hope to God that Apple hires a Usability Specialist to get your bloated, slugging arse in gear before Apple stocks crumble (see what I did there?) and they can't afford to keep Steve Jobs in replacement organs and private jets.

If Apple did the RIGHT THING and made iTunes better, and simpler to use, they could literally save Steve Jobs's life if he has any further complications in the future.

SAVE STEVE JOBS'S LIFE - COMPLAIN ABOUT ITUNES TO APPLE!!