One hundred posts!

Let's celebrate with a pic.

Reddish Thicky

I can't remember what reddish thicky is, or even if it's important. It came to me this morning while I was pondering my situation. What was, or is, reddish thicky? Is it a place name? Or a food? I no longer recall. All I can remember is the name. Perhaps you know.

In other news, nothing much has happened. Or perhaps they have and I can 't remember what they were. I hate not being able to remember. I forget so much, though I can recall all kinds of crap. I berate my son for reciting lines from Harry Potter films or Simpsons movies, yet know loads of lines from films like Blade Runner, Aliens and others. Why do we remember so much shite? It's not like we have any choice half the time. Advertisment jingles are the worst offender, along with crappy catchy pop tunes. There's so much useful stuff that just slips out of your brain.

This is why I worry about reddish thicky today.

What if it's really important and I can't remember why?

La la la la la mmmm

You ever feel like you've lost focus?

I'm a daydreamer. Really on another planet most of the time. Just recently I've been getting worse, and it's worrying. Why the hell do we daydream? What possible reason could our primate brains have for only having half a mind on the job, while the rest is thinking of inventive ways to dispatch zombies* or defeat the Gorfian empire in the Denebian system?

It's a useful tool, I suppose, when you're bored, but when you need to concentrate and instead find your mind wandering the plains of Mordor, it's disurbing. I keep wondering whether there's some line you cross, where you just end up drooling in a ward for the delusional somewhere, forever lost to the world. A film like Brazil starts to make more sense.

I imagine successful people rarely daydream. Their brains are wired to face front all the time, even when relaxing. When I'm relaxing, I get sudden, terrifying jolts of did I pay that bill? Is the car locked? Or where am I supposed to be tomorrow? Curse my disorganised brain.

 

*For the record, dispatching zombies is a secondary concern. After years of research, the best survival tactic I can recommend is to make sure everyone gets along. Invariably in zombie films, it is the human protagonists who kill themselves by taking their eye off the masses hordes of the undead and instead arguing and fighting amonst themselves. If only they'd put aside their differences, calm down and work together, they'd still all be alive. That and a zero tolerance policy for bite victims.

You can see I've thought this through, can't you?

£2.56

I bloody love Sinclairs Oyster Bar. It is, without doubt, the best pub in Manchester. It can't claim the best beer, or patronage of some footballer or Coronation Street no-mark. It's evening clientele is a mix of students and older, hardened drinkers. It's old and poky and has some pretty grotty toilets. It also has the honour of being moved, piece by piece, not once, but twice in it's long, almost certainly mock-tudor existence. It does in fact, sell oysters, though only during the day and almost certainly not farmed from the nearby ship canal. You can't get a seat upstairs to save your life some nights and the bar upstairs has a worse selection of savoury snacks than the bar downstairs. There are probably cleaner, more stylish or authentic places to drink. And the fenced off area outside for smokers resembles a creche for alcoholics or some kind of street theatre on Saturdays.

I love Sinclairs because it cost £2.56 for a pint of bitter and a pint of mild last night. It's cheaper for me to get a tram to Manchester and drink in Sinclairs than it is to drink in a lot of pubs in Bury.

Perversely, the humble pint of mild, the cheapest drink you can buy, is also the best. The bitter is variable, sometimes it's nice, sometimes it's double rough, but the mild soldiers on, unburdened by pretension or a need to prove itself. Lovely mild. Lovely Sinclairs Oyster bar. Lovely £2.56.

Las Vegas

Flamingo hotel, Las Vegas, exterior, night
Originally uploaded by Smallbrainfield.

I didn't bother writing about Las Vegas when I got back. Mostly because I was going through a can't be arsed with my blog phase. This happens quite a lot. (Not being arsed, as opposed to going to Las Vegas, which has only happened once. Well, to me at any rate. Anyway. )
To say it's an amazing place is like saying London smells of cabbages. It's true, but it's only part of the story. Las Vegas is built in the middle of fuck-all. Flying in you get an appreciation of the size of the U.S.A and how much fuck-all they have to go round. It's just desert for miles and miles. Some of it looks quite pretty but it's still a big expanse of not much actually.
In the middle of all this sits Las Vegas. Say what you like about the sickening amount of waste such a city creates, it's size and spectacle overwhelms the senses. Think about it. Every single thing from water to lobster to beer to petrol and CSI baseball caps has to be flown or driven in. Nothing is made in or around Las Vegas apart from money and rubbish. God knows where they bury it all. (The waste, not the money.)
We stayed at the Flamingo, one of the oldest hotels on the strip. Despite the Flamingo girls and the neon, it's probably the most pedestrian casino on the strip. Later additions such as Paris or New York New York take their themes and run with them, no expense spared. Other hotels pride themselves on their opulence, such as the Bellagio. Then there are the monster casinos, like Caesars Palace or the MGM Grand. A saunter through the casino at the Grand takes about half an hour alone, it's that big.
Beyond the main strip it's mostly building yards as yet more materials are shipped in to build even more casinos. Like the city, the building never stops. The apartments going up around the Bellagio were lit at night, and construction carried on throughout.
Las Vegas is a paradise for the insomniac or the jetlagged. You can walk down the road with a beer at 4 a.m. and providing your not weeing in the gutter at the same time, the police won't bat an eyelid.
It's a mental place, full of contradictions. Some of the architecture is intricately beautiful, (for example, the facade of the Paris), and yet it's all pastiche. Inside the casinos, the constant tumble of slot machine cylinders and the occasional whoop of a winner roars on 24 hours a day. I had some of the best seafood of my life in Las Vegas, a place that must be several hundred miles from the sea. I also slept really well, despite the jetlag.
You leave wondering if it's real. How can a place like Vegas be allowed to exist? Are all american cities like this? The people are friendly, and the attitude to gambling is akin to that of someone in the UK spending the weekend caravaning, in that it's pleasant for a weekend, but you wouldn't want to spend your life living in one. It's not immoral as such, just a very different attitude to gambling, which in the UK is still somewhat the preserve of shifty blokes in shifty betting shops. You kind of find yourself wondering where all the rough parts you see on CSI are as well. If you stick to the strip, you won't see any of that.
Having said that me and the missus won $260 and I had the best breakfast of my life there. I'd go back in an instant if asked.

Sun

After weeks of rain, the sun reared it's head above the clouds this morning. Hip hip hip hooray! It's got it's hat on and it's coming out to play. Which will be a great comfort to all those poor sods that are sitting in flood waters as I type.

It's cold and frosty. The car feels soggy throughout after weeks of wet, so when I defrosted the windscreen this morning it was practically raining inside. My dad keeps telling me to use the air conditioning to dry out the car, but I still haven't bothered to read the instructions in the manual so I just turned up the heating and opened the window a bit when it got so my eyeballs were stinging. Since I broke the sunroof, I've been wary of trying the other gadgets in case I break them too. My old car was basic but solid. This one is full of exciting stuff which my man-hands seem to be only too capable of smashing like glass straws under the feet of giant metal men.

In other news, I bought some memory for my PC. I've never bought memory before and am prepared to be underwhelmed by the benefits it brings to computing. Crucial Memory had a really nice graphic like a sort of digital rev counter showing how much improvement I could expect by adding more memory, despite their motherboard recognition tool showing the wrong motherboard. Still it wasn't too expensive, so I'll see what happens.

 

As I type, the sun has also brought out the builders, who are industriously demolishing a wall right next to my office. It's the wall all the delivery vans bump into when they're turning around, and was kind of falling down anyway, so at least it shouldn't take them long. I had to move my car, which was a swine as all the good spots had gone and I 've had to park at the far end, where the ivy grows over the wall so much that I had to get out of the car through the passenger door. Never mind, I got to walk out in the fresh morning air and see the sun again. Wonderful!

Rain.

When will it stop?

 

It's been raining for weeks. It's grey and miserable and wet and bloody relentless.

Today is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year. But hey, cheer up everyone. It could be worse. It could be flooding or snowing. Ah. It's going to do both of those later on. Oh well.

 

What can cheer us all up? I don't know. Is it too much to ask for a bit of sunshine?

Oo, oo, it's the weekend!

Yay for weekends! Why are they so good? We even gaze wistfully at the slightly bobbins ones we have known, as being somehow better than workdays.

Anyway, I'm off to the gym tonight, despite my stiff neck, then back home for some neck oil in front of the telly methinks, possibly trying to watch the second half of 28 weeks later while the missus is out gallivanting. She doesn't like scary films, and won't watch thrillers at night 'cos she can't sleep.

As a result, watching horror films is a long winded process for me, so hopefully 28 weeks later isn't too long, or it might turn into 3 acts.

Happy weekend to my reader in Cheltenham, hope the rain keeps off for you!

Sunroof

I live in Manchester. It rains a lot. Last night, on my way home from work, I thought it would be a good idea to dry out the car, which has been damp since about October.

To do this, I turned on the heating and thought hey, hot air rises, why not open the sunroof a touch and let all that warm damp air out that way? Leaving me in my nice warm dry car, smug in my application of science.

Except when I came to close the sunroof, it juddered to a halt.

I got home and rang the garage. Joy, they were still in. But, ah, you're just out of warranty. Meantime, what do I do about the hole in the roof of my car? It turns out there's a manual override, which means poking an alan key into a recess in the roof. The snag is, you can only turn it a quarter turn each time, so it took the best part of 15 minutes to close the roof. Even then, I wasn't sure it was properly closed. I checked this morning and it doesn't appear to be letting water in, but now I need to find a dealer garage to check it out. I suppose it could be damp wiring or a fuse, but it the way it juddered to a halt...

 

Curse my science brain!

Gym

After a Christmas of pushing food into my facehole and topping the resultant midden off with lots of lovely beer, I have taken it upon myself to go to the gym. Well, I say that, what actually happened was my healthy mate bet me and another exercise-shy pal twenty notes that we couldn't hack it at the gym two nights a week for a month.

Well, ha ha, we showed him. We've been going for nearly two weeks already and January is practically over.

Every time I've been so far it's been raining and dark, but from the outside, it's a pretty grim looking place. Inside you notice it was clearly a meat warehouse from the white-tiled walls and the rails for hanging meat on. Anyway, upstairs it's still a bit rough looking, but at least The Long Good Friday vibe leaves you. It's a blokes gym, so it's not what you'd call stylish, but the equipment works and more surprisingly, so did I. It's easier to go to the gym with a few people. You egg each other on, at the same time not wishing to look soft, you lift or shove as much weight as you can.

It hurts after each visit, and my neck is aching this morning, so goodness knows what I've done to that. But I don't care. It's an hour of mind wash time, where you don't particularly have to think about anything above how much what you're doing is doing you good / causing pain. Yay for exercise!

 

Can I use your dictaphone?*

Happy belated new year.

 

First of all, I want to make it totally clear that I'm very disappointed in all of you. If you don't pull your socks up, you're not going to pass those 'o' levels you so deeply crave, your passport to further education; a blissful cushion against the hard, painful world of work. They used to send kids up chimneys you know.

 

Well, look at the state of this place. What a decrepit tip. How do people keep up blogs? Do they have people to do it for them or do they just never leave their computers alone? My worst problem is that most of my best ideas occur when I'm far from a keyboard, and of those I remember, they never seem as good by the time I get round to writing them up. This also happens when I think of ideas for humourous pictures, but I can usually do them. Plus, I can always add a reminder note on my mobile, which led to the classic "Why have you just written 'Ray Mears builds a woman' on your phone?" from my wife. Good times.

Perhaps I'm just not cut out for this blog lark. It's bad enough having a Flickr account, membership of several forums and messageboards. God help me if I joined Facebook (NEVER). How do people do all this stuff and still have time for rich, fulfilled and above all interesting lives away from their keyboards? Damned if I know.

 

Anyway, I've joined a gym, which I might write about if I can be arsed, and I'm looking forward to seeing Aliens versus Predator Requiem and Cloverfield. And I'm still buying 2000AD and NME, though I'm not sure I like the new logo the 'AD have adopted. So there.

 

*The reply to which is of course, no, you can use the telephone like everyone else.