Got my Goat: Oven Chips.

You want to know what's got my goat today? No? Well I'm going to tell you anyway.

Oven chips. Or fries if we're in the the New World.
I am sick and tired of pouring some out onto the baking tray to find lots of the little slivery ones. Now, I actually like the small ones, but the slivery off-cut ones don't cook correctly. As soon as you see them, you know that the poor little buggers will never survive the 18-20 minutes cooking time. They'll be dead in 10.
11 minutes and you can shave with them.
12 minutes and they're carbon.
13 and they're something beyond carbon.
14 minutes and you wish they were just carbon.
15 and they're carcinogenic
20 minutes and they're pure cancer.

"But Jamie. But Jamie!" I hear you say in that whiny voice "Why don't you take those out early, or eat them when you go to shake the chips at the 10 minute/halfway mark?"

Because I expect my chips to be uniform and available AT THE SAME TIME! I don't want a "little nibble" halfway through, like the little chip-tease that they are. I demand my chips survive the cooking process and arrive on my plate at the same time dammit!
Grr!

I want my goat back now.

Spare.

I was asked for spare change the other day.

Why does this nearly always happen when I have my camera out in town? We're a tourist town, I know, and if you want to look like a non-local then get your camera out seems to be the answer. I hardly ever get asked when I'm not taking pictures of random nonsense.

I was just standing there minding my own business, testing the limits of my new camera to see if its digital zoom could stretch to the far reaches of the Universe (it can't, sadly), when this guy wandered over and said;

" Excuse me mate (see what he did there. He started off by making us out to be friends. Aww). I don't know if you can help me, but my van has just broken down and I need some change to call somebody. You can't spare some change can you?"

Now if he was really my mate, he would have known that it was futile to ask me for money.
A couple of things didn't help with his chances of me giving him money either. First, I didn't really like the way that he was looking at my camera the entire time that he was with me. In fact, I don't remember him making eye contact once. It also didn't help that he stank of alcohol and crime. Real nice to claim your car has broken down when you stink of booze.

Sure I'll give you some change for a call. Who are you calling, the AA? (Automobile Association) Or how about calling the Police to confess to your drink driving.

I wish they wouldn't come and ask me though. Why do I look like I have spare money? I dress as badly as they do.

I should have told him to reverse the phone charges, but the last person I said that to (his van had apparently broken down), he told me to f_ck off :(

They definitely target the tourists for money here. They have a long way to go before they can beat Vancouver beggars though. I think on my first proper trip into the downtown, a guy came up to us and said;

"Excuse me. I wonder if I could just take a moment of your time. Unfortunately, I have the Aids virus......................"

Wow. You beat the broken down van guys every time. I mean where do you go from there? How on Earth do I trump that? The guy is claiming to have friggin' AIDS. I have no way to not give him money and still look like a semi-decent guy. I mean, you'd have to say something like "AIDS? Wow. Me too. And shrapnel in my head. And malaria. I have days to live. Hours even. In fact, I probably won't live long enough to actually pass you the change from my pocket. So sorry. I can't waste what little time I have left. I must dash. Byeeeeeee"
I think I gave the very first person to ask me for change, about two dollars. I felt sick afterwards. Whenever I'm short of change now, I always think of that guy.

I was asked for money NINE times on one trip out in Vancouver. Admittedly, one of those was the cashier at Safeway's, but still. And that's more like attempted robbery than begging. By the eighth person asking, I swore to myself that the next beggar to ask would get my change right in their face. To be fair, they are normally polite in Vancouver. Here, if you politely say "sorry, no I don't", they have been known to tell you where to go, what you can do when you get there, and who with (normally my mother).
Oh yeah! I'm really likely to give you change now aren't I?

There's a "homeless" guy in town who I know for a fact has a house. I have to assume it's fully paid for, as I can't imagine the stress of trying to meet your mortgage payments entirely through begging.

I always feel like I want to see references when people ask me for change. I mean, how do I know they're nice people? I don't want to give money to somebody who's saving up to buy a knife so he can become a mugger or something.

It gets complicated and I really wish they wouldn't ask me.

Do I sound like a bad person?

Monday

I saw my first butterfly of 2011 today. I don't know who was more shocked.
It was a blur of fragile colour and loneliness.
Probably an escapee from the Butterfly Farm (tired of working the teeny-tiny ploughs).

"Children are for people who can't have dogs" ~ Anon

Engage! Well, divorced actually....

This is Tony Alleyne, of Leicester UK, who for some reason or another, has been popping up this week in various forms of media. Well, two to be precise. I can only assume that he has a new agent.

Now, I have heard of Tony before. Sadly, he appears to resurface onto our TV screens now and then based purely on what he has done to his flat (or apartment, if you live outside the UK).

In 2005, after his marriage broke down (and I can't for the life of me figure out why), he decided to convert the flat, that his wife still owned, into a 24th Century Star Trek environment, complete with:

Control panels (Switches, to you and I)
Light-up schematics (Lights, to you and I)
Engineering stations (Kitchen counter, to you and I)
Transporter platform (Waste of money, to you and I)
As well as numerous other Trekkie features.

Now while I don't think that this is the first time that a partner in the middle of a divorce has done something a bit "off the wall" to their soon-to-be-ex partner's walls, floors, and ceilings, I am amazed though that at nowhere during this entire process did his wife turn up with her legal department, armed with baseball bats to persuade him to maybe just put up some new wallpaper instead.

He was so tickled by the concept that he had stumbled upon that he decided to start his own company called 24th Century Design, in the hope that others would hire him to do the same to their homes. Sadly after spending £30,000 on modernising his wife's flat, and investing £100,000 in his company, it folded and left him bankrupt. Even more tragically, he had to use his Income Support payments to pay for the finishing touches to the flat. I'm sure that money is supposed to go towards food and electricity though, and speaking of which, just how much electricity does that place get through? I mean, I don't think he has a working Warp Core, and those aren't candles behind those panels....

Anyway, this week, he appeared on a new "Come Dine With Me" style show where a group of "contestants" go for dinner at each other's houses, poke around through their cupboards, looking for whips and handcuffs (and in many cases finding them), before rating the home out of 10.
At the end of the programme, the person with the most points wins......... something or other?

The group were a bit taken aback by the Starship Failed-Enterprise and even I have to admit that the place is very impressive. But in a very insane kind of way. As a set, it's fine. But as a home, not so much.
For a start, it has no natural light, as all of the windows have been covered up. Perfect unless you have claustrophobia and a very real fear of silvery walls closing in and suffocating you to death. Then there are the kitchen cupboards that he has designed to magnetically "pop" off the front of the unit, like the access panels on a Star Trek ship.
My kitchen cupboards used to do exactly the same thing in my old house. Although not exactly a feature that I would pay a premium for. Losing a toe to a cupboard door when you're trying to have some cereal at 2:00am is not what I would call cool.
And then there is the lack of a bed. That's right, there is no bed or even a bedroom in the entire place. There is the kitchen, a bench, a transporter platform, and a bathroom with shower and a quite disappointingly 20th Century porcelain toilet. I feel that a joke about Klingons at this point would be hugely obvious and not very clever.

Apparently he had asked himself that age old question that has troubled man for eons; do I really need a bed?
Not when I can have a transporter platform instead!
So each night, if we are to believe him, he settles down on the floor of his electricity-sucking mid-life crisis incarnate bachelor pad, somewhere between his transporter and the bench.

Cosy.

I picture him wrapped in a piece of futuristic tinfoil.
Of course man has survived without beds before. There was a time when our mattress was just the dirt of the ground, our pillow....a rock of granite, the roof over our heads......the cave ceiling, and our alarm clock was the gentle mooing of the Cave Bear as it woke us up with its teeth in our brain.

So it appears that in the 24th Century we will come full circle and be sleeping on the floor again. Isn't progress wonderful?

Oh and the other bit of media he appeared in was a certain tabloid newspaper, which I shan't name, but it's kinda a big glowy thing in the sky.
According to the newspaper article, Tony was left "heartbroken" this week, "HEARTBROKEN", to discover that his high-tech flat had been invaded by some very low-tech mould.
It is believed that the mould was caused by condensation from the heat radiating from the downstairs neighbour's highly illegal cannabis farm.
Come on Tony! If you were really smart, you would have been harnessing the thermal energy and using it to power your warp coil, or your microwave, or something.

Not a strange building to live in at all........
One tenant wants to be in space, while another wants to be spaced out.

Tony said "It was in the bathroom and the transporter. It was a nightmare."

The bathroom and the transporter? That's almost his entire house!

If you are interested in Tony and what he can do to your home, then please check out his website: http://www.24thcid.com/

If you are interested in Tony's downstairs neighbour and what he can do for your greenhouse, then check out your local paper, under the "Up in Court" section.

In the news....a plane.

First images of China's J-20 Stealth Fighter.

Ok, hands up, who was expecting it to be an exact copy of the American F-22?
Right down to the empty Coke can beneath the pilot's seat.

Those people gathered around the plane look bored. I can tell boredom when I see it. I see it a lot when I talk to people.

They're probably all thinking "They said it would be invisible".

I remember once trying to explain the F-117A to my Gran. Wait, this post is very geeky all of a sudden. Is it getting hot in here?
Anyway, she was watching the news and footage of the Stealth fighter in the Gulf war came on the telly. The announcer mentioned that it was radar-invisible and my Gran immediately came out with "But I can see it! That's not invisible".
I then spent a good 20 minutes trying to explain that she doesn't see with her radar, before I stormed out to have a breakdown in the bathroom.

There was a rumour a few years ago that an F-117A became radar-visible during an airshow visit in the UK. Apparently a build-up of water droplets, drizzle or "normal weather" as we like to call it in the UK, on the plane's surface allowed it to be detected by radar. The legend has it that the ground control and the plane's pilot had a disagreement over whether he was invisible or not.
This is all rumour and hearsay, so it fits in nicely with Stealth technology, which is after all wrapped up in strange rumours about UFO's, illegal test flights and out and out lies.

Frankly, if drizzle can make a Stealth plane visible, then no plane, Chinese or American stands a chance of invisibly attacking the UK. We'll see them coming before they even hit France. Of course we have no planes to shoot them down with. We'll just have to throw rocks and sharp sticks at them until they go away.

The best plane the the UK ever had was the Harrier. That was the plane that could stop in mid-flight and hover. Built mainly because the pilots, like all Brits abroad, get lost and have to stop and ask for directions.
We have the new "Euro Fighter", now though. Called that not because it is to be used throughout Europe, but because it cost a heck of a lot of money to make. Frankly with the cost of each of those fighter planes, it would be cheaper to bribe the enemy pilots to crash.
"Incoming enemy aircraft. A single Euro Fighter costs us $122 million to buy, so before we scramble some to intercept you, we'd like to make you an offer. We'll give you $30 million to eject and crash your plane"
"Err, roger that tower....."

When asked about the new Chinese fighter jet, Marine Col. Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Associated Press;
"It is not of concern that they are working on a fifth-generation fighter," since the Chinese are "still having difficulties with their fourth-generation fighter,".

Ouch! No need to get bitchy.

Heron

The Heron so beautiful
as it perches on the hedge.
Eying up the pond
and the fishy Universe that lies inside.
A galaxy of food
as you spy a planet to pluck
the fish have no concept of what you are
to his friends, your dinner will have died of natural causes.

In Snow

All of us making the best of this Winter wonderland
having to clear paths through snow, shovels in hand.
Houses full of tins,
boots on,
layered up,
Brandy inside us.
Digging in like Hoth Imperial assault survivors.

I like to think of all the families spending this time together,
trapped and forced to, due to this horrible weather.
And people of all faiths and races
coming together to throw snowballs into children's faces.

Sunday Night

Nothing much to report tonight.

I have a fully-fledged cold :(
I have also finished off the last of the grapes. I have never eaten 3kg of grapes before and I don't think I'll be eating grape, raisin or sultana for the next, oh.....20 or 50 years?
It nearly killed me. I couldn't tell whether it was Swine Flu or an accidental consumption of a lethal dose of grapes.

I found a Spider's web on one of the bunches. That freaked me out.
That's when my brain starts to be really unhelpful with thoughts like:
"I bet there's a deadly spider in the bag"
"I bet there's a deadly spider hiding inside the bunch of grapes"
"I bet there's a spider hiding inside one of the grapes, where we can't see it"
"I bet it's heavily pregnant....."
SHUT UP BRAIN!

Isn't it hilarious how your brain will always conjure up the thing that will scare you the most at the most scariest moment. Being the brain, it's privy to all that insider knowledge.

Whenever I have to walk through the middle of some random wood, the kind with trees, not a plank or a floorboard, I spend half the time thinking about all the horror films I've seen and "if this was a horror film, the killer would be behind me........now!"
So I look behind and then think "if this was a horror film, when I turn to face the front again, the killer will be right in front of me......now!"
Followed by "if this was a horror film, the killer would now be behind me...." and so on and so forth. For the entire walk, which I guess eventually becomes a run.
Oh yes, camping with me is a barrel of laughs.

Amalia and I stopped for lunch near a lake on Vancouver Island. We'd brought proper food, when I say lunch and lake, I don't mean we were fishing or Trout tickling.
I had finally, FINALLY gotten used to the wildlife of Canada and being in surroundings that had things that really would eat us if they had the chance.
In the UK, the only things that would possibly eat you are really big Pigs, homeless people, and maybe a flock of Sparrow Hawks.
Escaped zoo animals don't count. Or serial killers.

Anyway, we sat at the waters edge, with our backs towards the treeline. For some reason, Amalia thought that she heard rustling coming from the trees and had the feeling that we were being watched. The word "Cougar" came up, and we're talking David Attenborough type Cougar and not Sex in the City type Cougar.
Cougars seemed to be the one thing that still held fear for me. I'd gotten over the Bear thing, hadn't seen a Spider at all, and Wolves, well who can be scared of Wolves? They're like lots of adorable doggies.
Nothing happened, but it was my scariest lunch EVER. I was still facing the water, but kept looking back towards the trees ever 30 seconds, and ate the food too quickly. My neck muscles have never recovered. Nor my bowel.

Amalia still insists that there was something there.
My mind instantly went to a Canadian version of Deliverance. I disliked that film, so I didn't fancy fighting off a bunch of really polite rapists. But do you see what I mean, your brain always comes up with the scariest thing it can. A few snapping branches and Amalia thinks "Cougar", while my brain said "Maple-syrup drinking good ol' boys with a pet Cougar that's trained to eat English people".

My problem is that my brain comes up with things that aren't logical or very likely to happen.
We've discussed this and in the "flight or flight" .......
hmm.
I seem to have put "flight or flight" instead of the "flight or fight" that I intended to put. Well, I guess that gives you an indication of which way I'm inclined to go.

If Amalia jumps out at me, I normally freeze, wiggle my arms a little bit, then run for help.
If I jump out at Amalia, she normally jumps and then hits me. Which I guess is a good thing and has nothing to do with how she really feels about me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm brave when I have to be. I can fight off Bears, with pointy sticks with the best of them.
We climbed (ahem, walked) up a mountain one day and for each pile of Bear poop we came across, I acquired myself a slightly longer stick.
I had visions of me poking a really friendly, but misunderstood Bear, while shouting to Amalia to run while I saved her.

*Me poking Bear with stick.
Bear "Ouch! Stop poking me. Have you seen any good berries around here?"
Me "Run Amalia! RUUUUUUUN!"
*Pokes Bear again
Bear "Hey! Stop that. That's really irritating".
Me "RUUUUUUUUUUUN! .......some more. Keep running".
*Jabs Bear in the ribs
Bear "Will you stop that, you're really winding me up....."
*Poke
Bear "Stop it!"
*Poke Poke
Bear "Will you...!"
*Poke Jab Poke
Bear "Please stop. That's really...."
*Poke Jab Jab Poke Jab
Bear "I'M WARNING YOU".
Me "RUN AMALIA! IT SEEMS REALLY ANGRY!
*Poke
Bear "RIGHT! THAT'S IT! I'M SITTING ON YOU AND EATING YOUR TROUSERS!"
*Poke Poke

Anyway. That's what my brain comes up with. Well, it did in that case.

I have a cold.

Family Tree

Tonight I attempted to jot down my family tree.

It turned out to be more of a family sapling to be honest. My Gran was not as forthcoming as I had hoped. There is so much distrust in my family that if the house was very obviously on fire and you asked my Gran for a fire extinguisher, she'd ask you what you wanted it for.
After about three hours of intensive questioning, it felt like I had been pulling teeth all evening. Pulling teeth and then putting them back in again. Followed by more pulling.

We got as far back as my Gran's grandparents and my Granddad's parents (all on my Mother's side).
On my Father's side, we get nothing. I know they're out there, but they do such a good job of hiding. Besides, they nearly all live in Wales and it's hard to gather information from a land where even light cannot escape.
When my Father was alive, we'd travelled to Wales to visit his elderly cousin. We knocked and rang her bell for two hours and she refused to let us in. I'll admit, after the first 15 minutes, we probably should have left her alone, but we'd come a long way and we're stubborn and stupid in my family.

Shortly after, she sent my Dad a note, explaining how "it had been too long for us to meet again" and "maybe we should leave the past in the past".
After a brief exchange of letters, she died sometime later. Or maybe faked her own death? Who knows?

I know very little about my Dad's family. I know that he had an Uncle that sold a lot of property to a local publican for a jug of gold coins and then drank himself to death. Hopefully not in pub that was owned by the guy that gave him the gold coins, otherwise that was the deal of the century. The rest appear to be miners. That about sums it up. I always seem to hit a wall of silence when I ask about family history, so they're probably not exactly a shiny bunch of moral pennies.

So, after that and being disowned by my Dad's sister (don't ask), that leaves my Mum's family. And what a merry bunch they are.
I haven't found anything interesting yet, but I'm hoping that with a bit of digging, maybe a pirate or an inventor might turn up.
I'm not after anything special, but I'd just like to know where my family came from.

SRT: The Devil

Slightly random thought:

If the Devil is traditionally the father of lies and is only interested in deceiving and tempting mankind, wouldn't it be more likely that he created the contents of the Bible?

I mean, isn't it a bit strange that he hasn't published his own book? To throw us off the right track. For all we know, maybe we're angering God by being nice to each other and we are supposed to covet thy neighbour's water buffalo (or whatever it is). What if we're supposed to be evil to get into heaven? What if we spend our entire lives being good and kind and when we die, discover that God is very pissed off and that Satan has tricked us all?

I have heard it said that fossils and Dinosaur bones are just rocks, put there by Satan to test our faith. So if he did that, isn't it just as possible that the bones are real, but he made the Bible up? If God made the Dinosaurs first (well, technically slime first), maybe God is a giant T-Rex? Maybe he's a big fan of killing?

Anyway, all of this is irrelevant as God and the Devil are about as likely to exist as Harry Potter, except there's more proof of the existence of Harry Potter.

And while we're talking about Banana Slugs....

Mmmmm
Chocolate Banana Slug.
Courtesy of http://www.mackenzieschocolates.com

Ingrith Deyrup-Olsen

Most of us will end up inside a box
or scattered, sprinkled and given to the mist.
Maybe if we're lucky we'll die an interesting death
or enigmatically
never be found
Sometimes after we're gone
we can be found again
visited again
missed again
even by people we haven't known.

I found you in America
in Seattle
in an old waterfront warehouse
in a fascinating junk shop
in a boring white cabinet
in a large white drawer.
Such an unassuming casket
such an invisible mausoleum
of the departed
the dead
living within
trapped within
recorded within
hundreds of black and white photographs.

A drawer of the deceased, discarded and forgotten.
Pictures of pretty faces
sad faces
some scary faces
young and old faces
places
with snow
sea
cars that were owned by old faces
with old hair
and old clothes.
Weddings
anniversaries
holidays
birthdays
but no funerals.
But then these were all photographs of funerals.
Rescued from deceased estates,
the photographs wait for the living
the curious living to spend some time with them.
Stay with them awhile.

And in that drawer, I found a photograph
of a lady with a loving face

a happy face
a curious face.
You were a professor
a zoologist
a lover of life
and encourager of science and students.
You liked slugs
and studied slugs
I like banana slugs
I wish we could have met properly
as I have many annoying banana slug questions.

But photographs can't really talk.
They just exist to eventually remind us that the dead once existed.
That these paper people were once flesh
and had dreams that spread far beyond a junk shop drawer.
Beyond my hands.

One day,
If I am lucky,
my photograph might reside inside a drawer.
Where I can be visited by new people.
And they will witness old events for the first time.
My life

an age
in photographs.
before my life was recorded in data.
I'm afraid that hard drives and memory sticks don't attract the curiosity of the passer-by
like the immediacy of photographs
of long-dead people

in drawers
in junk shops
in warehouses
in Seattle.

The Grape Escape

I was blessed with free shopping yesterday.

The self-service checkout seemed most perplexed by the 3kg of reduced-to-clear grapes that I had bought.

I scanned the items and before I could do anything, the machine spat out a receipt for -2.65 and told me to take my shopping and go (not in those exact words).

Not wanting to get rugby-tackled by a security guard, I called over the supervisor who said;
"I've never seen it do that before."
Which is the exact same thing that he said to me a few days before when the same machine short-changed me.

So the supervisor voids my (free) sale and scans the items through himself. Same thing happens. The machine was confused by the price reductions on the grapes and it essentially meant that every bunch of grapes that you purchased deducted 2.69 from your bill.

He then takes me over to the manager and explains it all to her. She looked like she'd checked out a long time ago and just wanted to go home. The super explained how the machine was saying there's nothing to pay and she just said;
"Then he can take it and go."

Wow. Nobody argues with these machines. So I got all of my groceries for free, due to the excessive purchase of reduced grapes.

Frankly, if they'd had enough grapes left, I would have gone back round for a flat-screen TV.

Strangely enough, the only other time a self-service machine "gave" me something, was when it insisted that I put an item that refused to scan in my bag, forcing me, making me, take something that I hadn't paid for. That was grapes too.

Taking the Wii

This is an extremely tragic and sad post.

About 4/5 years ago, I was a 10-times F1 World Champion, on my Playstation.

I had a period where I LOVED playing driving games, all driving games. To the point where I could play them on the maximum difficulty settings and still win most games. Tragic I know.

I worked my way through all the teams, all the cars, adjusted the settings to make the game harder and harder and really enjoyed the thrill of winning and knowing that I had beaten the game. I would spend hours each day doing this. After all, once I had got the important life stuff out of the way, my time was my own.

Then I realised that I was pissing my life away.
I know I sound a tad judgemental of gaming fans, and if so, that's not my intention. This is a personal conclusion that I came to about what I was doing.

I decided that unless this was going to enter me into some prize-winning tournament or would kick-start a non-existent racing career (when let's face it, G-Forces would crush me like a bug on the first corner), then for all the hours that I spent playing this game, and all the trophies that I won, were worth nothing to my real life. It was giving me a distraction from my life that was passing by.

I love console games, and I get a huge thrill from playing them, especially with friends, but I know in my heart that it doesn't give you anything other than a shiny bauble to gaze into while your life is ticking away like a relentless clock. I read somewhere that the overall budget of the entertainment industry, TV, Film, Books, Magazines, Games, etc comes to more, far more than we humans spend on health care and medicine.
Isn't that strange? I mean, I can see that, but I think it's funny that we spend more on things to distract us from our lives than something to preserve them.

I wonder what it is about our brains that mean we have to be entertained or distracted all the time.

On a side note, you know how dogs and cats have favourite toys? Well have you ever seen pictures of Wolves, Wild Dogs, or Big Cats playing with favourite sticks or rocks in the wild?
Neither have I. I mean, I know that they play and have fun, but I think the toy thing is something we've given to our domesticated animals.
I think maybe Leopards don't need a furry Mouse, or a Wolf a squeaky ball. Their main focus is on what they need.

And I guess out pets now have the luxury of not having to hunt or forage for food anymore, or guard their family, so they have more time on their hands. Maybe more time for play? I don't know?

So do I need computer games? Certainly not. But I love them.
I was watching my friend's newborn daughter trying to comprehend what her mother was doing, dancing to her Wii, and it made me wonder about what type of games she will be playing in 30 years time. In my lifetime, we've gone from Pong to 3D Nintendo DS'ssss. And that's just in 30 years. My mind boggles at what toys she might have when she's an adult.

I'm not saying that games don't have a place in my life, but when I see friends complete games and then go back and play them again and again and again and again for weeks or months, to unlock achievements that give you NOTHING but pixels on a screen, I have to wonder whether we've just Monkeys pushing buttons to look at the pretty lights. At least lab monkeys get food for pressing the right buttons.

I remember when Facebook went down for a day and I had friends seriously freaking out because they had crops to harvest on Farmville. If we could have them controlling real tractors on real farms from their laptops, we'd be laughing.

Another friend walks her virtual dog more than her real life one. It even has the same name and is the same breed of dog. What's the point of that?

There are lots of ways to waste life, so I'm not just picking on games here, it's just that they seem the most obvious and yet pointless candidate. They're just fluff to entertain us. Even if we have "brilliant" lives with a loving family and a great job, why are we removing ourselves from that for hours each day?

I played Sims for one day, and the little bastard that I created had a better life than I did. In just ONE DAY of playing.

He woke up, had breakfast, had to take the puppy to the Vet's, chatted with a nice lady in the park, arranged a date, came home, made a sandwich, I thought "Hey, I'd like a sandwich. Where's my sandwich?" It's in the bloody kitchen you fool! Stop making virtual sandwiches and go and make a real one!!! And go outside!

Anyway, this rant has gone on for too long. Play games, they're great fun. but please also notice what's around you and appreciate who and what you have.

Rant over.