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Showing posts from January, 2009

more on bus drivers, with a removal man thrown in for good measure

Back to Warwickshire bus drivers. Got to the bus stop today, and the driver - small, round, about fifty, balding, Cornish-pastie with a pickled onion and pint of Guinness type - was just tapping into his mobile phone. "Be with you in a minute, love," he said, "when I get myself off Facebook". Facebook? Now I'm even wondering whether I'm right about the Cornish-pastie. Perhaps I've got him all wrong and he's a rocket-and-anchovy-salad-with-a-coriander-dressing-and-glass-of-Sauvignon type. The world's gone mad. It reminded me of the lad who helped us move in to this house a couple of months back. He comes in - tall, thin, nylon tracksuit, Nike cap, the words 'I-like-looking-tough' tattooed down his left arm and the words 'I-like-frightening-people' carved into his army-short hair - and he happens to see Husband's 'Learn Japanese' book in one of the boxes. 'Oh,' he says, 'who's learning Kanji,...

How to recover from accidents with fish with your dignity intact

Look, I know everyone's trying to deal with the credit crunch and all that, but some people are just not getting it right in their efforts to start up new and thriving businesses. My uncle is trying to start up a new business as a frozen fish manufacturer. The problem is, he didn't read the manual. The manual would have told him to: purchase a factory purchase freezers order fish off a fisherman wait for the delivery freeze the fish in the freezers sell the frozen fish Having not read the manual, he followed his own DIY method: go into a pet shop buy a fish tank buy £57 worth of tropical fish bring them home put them in the fish tank keep the water at a temperature too cold for the fish freeze the fish to death find that there are, sadly, no buyers for stiff and inedible tropical fish My uncle has three fish left. He didn't want to tell me how many he'd started with. I think, you know, he's going to have to find some other way to raise mon...

Why you should keep an eye on your toolbar

I don't normally pay a lot of attention to the toolbar at the bottom of my screen while my laptop is powering up, but it still being my Christmas holidays from school, and me being tranquillised by a diet of mince pies, Belgian chocolates, left-over Stilton and half-good novels, I'm in a zombie-like state. I turned my laptop on today and my eyes flickered - no, flickered is too active a word ... perhaps 'meandered lazily' is more accurate - to the toolbar where it tells you, while it's trying to locate the Internet, what your computer is doing. And mine was, at one point, 'bursting cached scripts'. Eh? This raises a number of questions which I would like answered, as, yes, there are a few scripts on my computer, mainly Nativity plays I've written for youth work at church, sketches I sent to Radio 4 hoping they'd think they were funny, and thirteen husband and wife fight on the motorway sketches in no way inspired by real life events. So: 1....