foreverblueskies.com

…you mean the green thing I mentioned here?

Well, it’s one of these…

So Becky’s got a new car. OK, not new, but new to her. 73,000 miles, British Racing Green Mini. It’s a bit of a bucket but it’s a bit of a laugh too. Personally I love it. And it made it all the way back from Scotland too, so that ain’t a bad run. All it needs now are sparkplugs, leads, points, fanbelt, an oil change and some TLC. Oh, and I need to take the twatty Max Power sticker off the back window too…

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I was in my home city of Aberdeen this weekend but I came home to England in the wee hours of this morning… The name of the city of Aberdeen is printed clearly on my passport and my driving licence but I have mostly lived in English towns and cities… I have two strong Scottish names but I speak with an English accent… It’s hard in some ways when you’re born a Scot but bought up as English… I am definitely British, vaguely a Scot but I am certainly dyed-in-the-wool English…

Yes, I am English. St. George is our patron saint and has been for nearly 800 years. And today it is St. George’s day, so stand up and be counted all you English. We have done bad, we done good, but we should be proud of our positive achievements and never forget our traditions, we should celebrate our identity, honour and remember the many men and women who have died defending this once-great country and out of respect for them and our own humble selves stand up and take the flag forward.

For St. George, For England !

Oh, and where’s our day off?

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Would you Adam & Eve it? The Clash was released 30 years ago today?

Man, I was probably still building Lego and scribbling pictures of volcanoes, dinosaurs and world warfare when this star of an LP came out, so it unearths sunny snapshots of the Spring of ’77 and knowing that 30 years ago is when it all started… sitting on the playing field of an East Anglian school in a Union Jack hat whilst Jonny Rotten growled “God Save the Queen, She ain’t no human being.”

I mean it man.

Then moving to Essex… concrete jungles, new towns and drab cities, the Harlow glue sniffers, the Chelmsford Skinheads, Punks, Scooterboys, Rockers, the Oi Boys, 9 Below Zero…

But I digress, this is a day to remember Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Terry Chimes, this is a day to remember The Clash and their first LP, a true and genuine punk gem of shiny new black vinyl.

BBC Radio 6 are supposed to be playing plenty of Clash this morning, but if they don’t give us a good run for our money there’s plenty of Clash on my iTunes… oh wait… oh bollocks! Wrong PC… all my Clash is on my home machine not on my laptop. Sod it!

Now I’m annoyed. I need my Clash fix.

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OK folks, quiz time.

Becky’s just gone and bought something and I’ll give you a clue… it’s green.

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I got tagged by Annie a couple of posts ago, so here’s the crack…

Take your Birthday in the format DD Month and look it up in Wikipedia. Then post 3 events, 2 birthdays, 1 death and 1 holiday.

Here goes…

3 Events

1752 – The British Empire adopts the Gregorian calendar, skipping eleven days (the previous day was September 2).

A fitting selection as this is a chronological entry and I’m a Brit. Plus where did those eleven days go? Did people miss a birthday that year?

1814 – Francis Scott Key writes The Star-Spangled Banner.

A little tribute to my American friends

1959 – The Soviet probe Luna 2 crashes onto the Moon, becoming the first man-made object to reach it.

Now that’s just cool. Nothing crafted by the hand of man had touched that place before. Neat. And Kruschev had the cheek to commerate the landing by giving a gift to Eisenhower. LOL

2 Births

1849 – Ivan Pavlov, Russian scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 1936)

Best known for his experiments in conditioning… remember Pavlov’s dog?

1910 – Jack Hawkins, British actor (d. 1973)

As a child raised on War films I remember him well for his part in the film The Cruel Sea.

1 Death

1982 – Princess Grace of Monaco, American actress (b. 1929)

I didn’t know that and I didn’t remember it either, I was probably more interested in playing D&D at the time…

1 Holiday

In ancient Greece, the first day of the Eleusinian Mysteries, during which the sacred objects were brought from Eleusis to Athens.

Being of no fixed belief I sided with the polytheist ancients on this selection.

Now if you wanna have a go just do it and I shall be picking on some unsuspecting souls in a short while… OK… My BBFK is first on the list, followed by Mummy/Crit and er… I know, Brom man. Oh sod it, I’ll pick on Rebekah too.

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Although I’m employed in the web industry I’ve always said the Internet is the biggest waste of time ever… social book-marking, blogging, youtube, myspace, blah blah blah.

And, despite being a self-confessed nerd and my girlfriend being the good Dr BBFK PhD, you come across stuff like this in the world…

Scientists perfect Bacon Butty

Which starts with these opening paragraphs…

“Scientists have created a mathematical formula of how to make the perfect bacon butty.

Experts at Leeds University discovered the secret to the ideal sandwich lay in how crispy and crunchy rashers were.”

Scientists? Experts? What a waste of braincells…

“Four researchers at the Department of Food Science spent more than 1,000 hours testing 700 variations on the traditional bacon sandwich.”

Cure for Cancer? Eradicate Aids? Fight Malaria? No, they dream up a formula for the “perfect” bacon sandwich. What use is that in the world?

Get a life you tossers!

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…not to work out of this office when I used to work remotely for 4 years!

1. Want to start working at 8am ‘cos you’ve got a flash of inspiration? Well, that’s tough, ‘cos you have to start at 9am, so you’d better start getting ready now
2. I have to religiously and securely pack up and move my:
1. Laptop
2. Power pack
3. Mouse
4. PDA
3. It takes 40 minutes to drive 5 miles.
4. Sometimes it takes an hour to drive 5 miles.
5. That drive, obviously, pisses me off and it’s no good coming into work pissed off because you got stuck behind a
   1. Crap cyclist
   2. Learner Driver
   3. Dust Cart
   4. Doddering Old Age Pensioner
   5. Nobody in particular

6. Having to drop littl’un off at school I don’t start work until, on average, quarter past 9 each day. I enjoy taking her in to school, but having to do the 5 mile “commute” afterwards is just a suck.
7. Having a 40 minutes lunch in my contract means that the 20 minutes I lose every morning leaves me with a 20-minute lunch, sometimes a 10 minute lunch, sometimes no lunch at all.
8. What a complete waste of time it is sitting in traffic for 40 minutes. If it weren’t the morning rush hour, it would be a 10-minute drive!
9. What a complete waste of fuel. And money.
10. Driving when you don’t have to is a completely unenvironmentally friendly thing to have to do.
11. Once I get to the office I have to unpack and plug in all the stuff from 2)
12. My chair sucks. It’s one of those “subordinate worker’s chairs” where at home I have a swivelling, armed, high-backed reclining “I am comfortable all day ” chair.
13. In the office, there is very little natural light from a tiny window.
14. I don’t get to sit anywhere near that window, the one source of light.
15. The office is small, claustrophobic, boring, has magnolia walls, no plants, no pictures, (not even those motivational posters) and it smells a bit musty.
16. Got itchy feet? Got an idea? Need to pace about? Not in here, you don’t, it’s far too bloody small, and the rest of the building is boring and there’s no place to go and socialise with the other drones.
17. I have to share the bathroom here with people who have worse toilet manners than myself.
18. There is a computer in this office that was bought and set-up for me and yet I hardly ever use it, except for email and a bit of surfing.
19. If the justification of me being in the office is that my company bought me an expensive computer then that’s complete waste of time too.
20. This is an IT company on an Industrial estate and the pollution in the air around here is not what you’d expect from working with computers everyday – the waft of diesel from the industrial estate and aviation fuel drifting down the breeze from the nearby airfield.
21. Health & Safety regulations state that because I work with a Visual Display Unit (3 of them in fact) I am required to take 5 minutes away from the screen every hour. Being a web designer stuck on a boring industrial estate there’s really not that much to do other than stay locked onto that screen…
22. I can do exactly the same job from home only more efficiently, more productively, with more motivation, I spend less money, I waste less fuel, I pollute less.
23. I join the rat race in their drive home at 5:30pm and it takes another 30 minutes to drive the 5 miles home… By which time I have driven a daily total of 10 miles (a 20 minute total journey in non rush hour) and wasted between 1hr 10 minutes and 1hr 30 mins.

On the other hand…

1. I do only do 8 hour days because I’m so desperate to get out of here… no more 10,12, 16 and 20 hour days like I used to do under my own steam.
2. I’m a five minute walk from the fantastic Farnborough town Centre [sic]
3. I’m a minute walk from my local friendly MOT centre, where I took the Flying Brick in today. I do that once a year, so that’s a massive advantage.
4. There are people in these offices I talk to occasionally…
5. I took a cool picture from here once…

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