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.