THIRTEENTWELVE

You see when I say "I'm a kev kid" I'm not just talking bullshit.

(hmm a few of you must remember me spending some time with the Boot Room team last year: I was rather surprised to find this out about their Boss (check 'Madchester'))

Oh no the snow. Ooger booger etc.

Are we all comfortably shivvering in the coldest temperatures in Britain since 1997? No. Are we fuck.

Is it even *that* cold. Is it fuck.

Its been far colder than this during the present winter and last autumn and other than the Hutton enquiry it just must of been a slow news week. That or Asda/Tesco/Sainsburys etc. got together upon hearing we might get some snow and flooded the media with all this "how to protect yourself from the cold" which handily means going to one of those supermarkets and buying soup and randomly lamb chops.

Yes there is snow. Yes the roads are a bit slippery. But its only really akin to very wet days when the nation isnt panicked into getting all excited about a bit of fuckin precipitation.

The most annoying thing about it for me as a driver, is that driving places doesnt take any longer and nor is any more of a challenge directly. The thing that gets me is people and how stupid they are.

Look, if you can see spray and it looks wet, its wet and not ice. If theres no spray and it looks normal (yet you know it is wet) then its ice.

No need to drive at 40 mph on the motor way just cos its a bit wet, when usually in the wet you'd be doing 60 or 70. These slow speeds lead people to belive they are just being cautious. But cautious drivers also look in their mirrors and out the windows other than the windscreen. Cautious drivers dont stare, like a tunnel visioned twat 2 inches infront of their car while being oblivious to the other road users.

What it causes is people hunched over their steering wheels (as if pressing your nose up against the windscreen offers some mircale vision aid in the snow) who dont anticipate things such as the need to over take. So you'll be driving along at 60 or 70 and one of these stupid mother fuckers just pulls out (with last second indication if your lucky).

Thats why accidents get caused. And thats what pisses me off. As you suddenly have to loose 30 or so mph to not hit them and then as you go past them they look at you as though *your* the stupid one. I'd say that 70% of these drivers dont drive like this in the wet or in the dry; so why they choose to in the snow I dont know.

Its as if snow and the medias spin that cos its snowing your all gonna die on the roads makes people actually go stupid. As in *more* stupid that normal.

No doubt I'll be having the Market St. chain gun on a Saturday afternoon dreams tonight then.

New credit and switch cards came in the post today so the stress of just quite how to sign them came up.

The way I have been siging reciepts has been nowt like either card for ages and just recently I've had to prove my identity a couple of times.

So I set about siging peices of paper till I came across the one I did most often. After filling 4 A4 sheets with signitures I've given up and just signed some shit on both.

Ah well. Last year when I last signed the cards (I break credit cards like you wouldnt belive) my signiture was all constant and had been for ages; but now its all gone to pot and is quite chaotic. Bloody thing.

Just got my phone bill. Also was on the phone to Big Balls discussing helping him make a website for someone.

His phone bill was £70 and hes like "the fucks all that about"

I wouldnt mind mine being £70 this month (as it would be usually). One-Hundred-And-Fifty-Mother-Fucking-Pounds.

Big Balls replies "you can tell the state of your relationship by the size of your phone bill"

Very true.

In a horribly early start I end up wasting time reading the paper before possibly taking my female parental to work.

In it theres a 2 interesting stories for me. The first is about how to survive the big freeze with all these guidlines about what to do (of which I, like you and everyone else will do nothing - because its not like its gonna feel any different to every other cold spell, its no longer, we're not in antartica and the world wont end tommorow) and the other is about the 19 year old student who put her virginity up for sale on eBay to pay for university. She hadnt lost it, apparently because she was a lesbian and for the £10,000 she wanted would throw in a massage if it "was any good". So I'm sat laughing with the paper in my hand in the living room.

The female parental comes in and asks what I'm laughing at, so I tells her.

She says "thats not funny, thats just sad, especially as her parents earn 60k and dont help out"

"no no no, I'm laughing cos shes a minger"

Blogger have just made itself Atom complient, which would appear that as well as publishing to this htm file it will also make an rss feed in that wacky space language xml.

Which is handy cos I wanted to play with making a flash companion this site using xml but didnt want to have to republish another seperate blog with all this ones content etc. and I only wanted to publish in one account (cos blogger for ages publishes in xtml compat shit - it would just depend on what I put in the template file and what I told the template file to be called on what format it comes out, I could simply lay the template out in xml and call it an xml and it would work fine - you didnt know that now did you?)

So no doubt in my reading week from college (which infact isnt a reading week cos I have to go in) where I should be thinking about next semester at college, the 2 days of freelance work I managed to score, the computing module and associated 2000 word essay (which so far no ones managed to write less than 5000) I will also monkey about with a flash/xml thirteentwelve blog thing.

Or maybe not looking at the actual rss feed of this site...

Now thats what being a student is all about.

Staying up till 3:30 am on Red Bull, Pepsi, Anadin Ultra and Star Mix the night before a hand in writing a 3000 report you've had weeks to do.

Dont worry 13twelve, its only your 3rd year and very important to your degree, dickhead.

Once I finished I felt fairly confident about it; well as confident about a piece of work in which every time I typed "guidelines" it came out "guildelines".

I had a tutorial on Tuesday which basically concluded the 2000 or so words I already done where a bit poo, I remember really rushing those without giving a fuck cos I was worring about the 5000 word essay for another subject (haha I wrote that mother fucker on Monday in 12 hours straight).

Trying now to decide whether my new tactic of doing lots of reading up on the area (strange innit) before writing my report out ways the time it takes to do the reading as opposed to just writing the fucker and reading on the fly as I do it.

All I gotta do now before my 4pm deadline is write the bibliography and read through it changing any obvious mistakes (presuming the whole 3000 or so words isnt just shit) - oh and print the mother fucker out, which means going to college and fighting for use of the one printer in our studio haha

So what have I learnt? An awful lot about design management. Which essentially seems like bull shit, as, currently, to me, it seems like some academics who needed to find a reason for themselves to exist formalised a bunch of logical, comman sense things (which everyone already does naturally) then added a bunch of academic shit (which no fucker in the real world will do) and then called it design management.

I should of entitled my report "what is design management" and concluded it was shit. Ah well, you live and learn.

Got the mighty Polo.

Currently it still cuts out, but I'll give it a few days to work in the new parts (to again conclude it still cuts out - but only when I slow down or stop). It is getting up to temperature and it is pulling like normal.

Feeling a bit down cos they also managed to break my air freshener.

For those of you that rode in the 1312 Polo you will have no doubt seen the spinning skull air freshener in action. Now all I have is the skull, the cross bones but not the clip that made the magic happen :-(

I dont think Oaklahoma in town had any in the last time I went; the only places on the net I can see anything similar is in the US (where shipping costs 10 times the cost of the freshener..)

With a bit of luck the clip will turn up or Oaklahoma will have some. Quite why the fuck they took it off the vent I cant even guess. It not being a part of the steering column or engine...

Good to have the Polo back, that old Clio was pissing me off!

The new Pepsi can style (of which I can find nothing on google) was loaded into our unis Pepsi machine, so on one of my regular trips to the said machine - I bought me one.

Quite like the new can, better than the last. Bit like a fizzy ribena can from the 80s somehow and not as good as old school cans. But nice enough.

But is the taste the same? Was I just thirsty and so taste buds not fully active or just had chewing gum or summin - I cant remember. But the taste did feel different somehow. Less sweet. When you have a can of Coke you get a cola flavoured after taste when you swallow - Pepsi you always used to get a really sweet (admittidly cola) aftertaste. What I had was inbetween, still sweet, but not as sweet.

I pray it was just me then, or that one can. I have plenty of Pepsi in reserve here though...

Fucking hell that Clio is shit.

Sorry to any Clio owners out there but, compared to my Polo its shit! Sure the 1.4 is quick, has leccy windows, stereo controls on the steering column and sits on the motorway no problem. The quirky interior I can even live with.

But. The clutch is either on or off an it offers loads of resistance, meaning you have to really press on the dam thing to hold it in - if you dont you jump forward or stall. This wouldnt be *that* bad if the pedals surface area was larger than that of a small coin; as it is fucking tiny it just digs into your foot.

When your sat in traffic your left foot gets really bad pins and needles. Then once you do get going, theres no quick lane changes cos the steering is so inprecise and indirect. If you then go on to find some windy roads, it wallows and feels sloppy and is, well, generally shit.

I cant wait to get the Polo back.

Been pimping a 92, k-plate 5 door Clio 1.4 (blue car) this morning.

The polo is ill :-(

After the headlight change last week it developed spluttering as it drove, wouldnt go through the revs cleanly, didnt pull normally or sound too healthy. Couple that with the steering height adjustment fucking up leaving my wheel to bounce on speed bumps its gone to get fixed.

When whatever broke that locked the steering wheel height, it managed to take my airbag electrics with it and the bit for the engine that was supplied to my local garage was fucked - hence last weeks public transport and now this clio.

Get well soon polo!

(alittle more Photoshopping)

My beliefs about public transport were almost quashed yesturday.

Yes waiting for a bus sucks. But given the medium I'm allowing for that.

The bus came, it was new, clean, it wasnt particulary noisy, it wasnt rammed, there were no pissed people, people smelling of piss or weird people staring at me (or worse pissed, piss smelling weird people staring at me).

The ride to town took longer than it would in the car, but not that much longer and for £4 return it was quite cheap.

I thought my prejudice against busses was perhaps finally undeserved.

Untill the journey home.

I stood outside a Spanish themed bar waiting in the bus stop for 30 mins in the cold. The cheap trashy Spanish theme music made me want to end my existance right there and then (how dare they play happy chirpy warm weather music when I was cold and not happy or chirpy) Many buses came and went, non of them going my way. People smug and warm in their cars driving past all comfortable.

The bus comes. Same sort of new bus as before. Rammed. Stank of smoke. Weird nasty warmth. Small child screamining all the way home. Bus swaying from side to side producing sea sickness. Weird, drunk man who stank of piss. Fucking nightmare.

So inconclusion, I will not be catching a bus again unless absolutly essential. Fuck that, *never* again.

I gotta say thats a well curious feeling.

Just drove up to the garage to drop my car off. Picked up a fella from the garage and drove him to my house, then he got in the driver seat and drove my car off.

Really odd watching your own car being driven off. Now realise my car makes more noise than I thought, though still not yet throaty enought (need a K&N air filter - come on april when insurance drops)

Now all I gotta do is catch public transport....

Is it me?

Apparently theres a full philharmonic symphony orchestra (and live radio 5 coverage) of a performance on an American composers song, "4mins 33" tonight.

This dipshit has had the incredibly original idea of writing a peice of music 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence in it (and then naming it just that)

Ok so its not a new piece, written in 1952. And I dont even care if he wrote it for a statement about modern society in some pretencious move - its just dissapointing that the world be duped by silence.

Does 4mins+ of silence count as music? No, no matter how you interpret the definition of music.

If it hadnt been read out on the news thats what he was doing tonight I would never have heard of John Cage. Sure you can call me uncultured, but the fact remains if I at 21 have never heard of him (and probably never will) then theres millions more of my generation who also never will.

Fortunatly John Cage passed away in 1992 so he will be blissfully unaware of the moronic twat cashing in on his old idea in order to be controversial and have 5 mins of fame (clearly unable to due it to his own merits).

Just watched this video (from memepool) and had a small chuckle.

Yeah yeah the arc of electricity is quite fascinating; i mainly like the fact that at the end of the video some guy who was watching just shouts "fuck"

haha

Had the new stop spam spam email from these people yet?

Nice site.... (fuckin minger)

Bloody height adjustable steering wheel things broke innit.

The steering wheel bounces up and down now, wont lock at any particular level.

Quite funny on a motorway to watch it sway; incredible frustrating when trying to park the thing, as its all over the fuckin place.

Just had the great task of changing my left headlight - which was full of water due to large crack in the glass and supporting arms being broke. Quite how I dont know.

To get the headlamp unit out you have to first take out the indicator unit next to it. And then the indicator unit on the other headlamp to take off a grill surround, which means you gotta take off the grill.

Clearly you need to gut the front of your car to get a headlamp unit off. (cos simple unbolting it is too simple)

So then I comes to trying to remove the nuts that hold it in. Its some nut format I never seen before. Like a phillips head but with more prongs. I break a screw driver trying to get one out. Shizzle.

So back on goes the grill surround followed by the grill. Then back in go the indicators and into the car I jump. Shizzle its getting dark, my headlights dont work and I need to get this shit done so I can go out.

Race to local town, run into Focus (Do It All) and look for torque wrenches cos thats what this stupid shape happens to be. Cant see them. Ask. Only as part of a socket set. Shizzle thats gonna cost shit loads. Cant find said socket set. Get angry. Find it. Shizzle cant see a price, fucking labels gone. Go find out how much this socket set, ratchet screw driver and torque set costs while trying to decide how much I would be willing to pay.

£3.49

"What the fuck" I say, "there must be more bits of metal in there than £3.49, I'll have that - was expecting at least a tenner" - bargain.

Get back in the car, shizzle its dark ish now, people are turning their headlights on. Shizzle flat tyre, or slow puncture thats not very slow, infact quite quick. Race home.

Shizzle it is dark cant see. Bonnet open, indicators out, grill surround out, grill out attack the bolts with torque wrench. T20 right size, works. Theres one more bolt. Shizzle where is it? FUCK! its only accessible through a small hole cos the headlamp unit is in the way and my screwdriver and torque thingy doesnt fit. Contemplate removing bumper. Sure that that needs more than one person. Shizzle. Decide to just lift the headlamp unit and ram screw driver in, praying that the torque bit meets the bolt so I can undo it. Watch as car raises on suspension as I heave to ram this fucker in. Bingo. Fuck me what luck. Get it unto, yank it out. Yank the connecting cable out. Inspect bulb that melted itself due to getting wet, thank god that my cars electrics didnt fuck up. Find spare bulbs. Fit to new head lamp unit. Fit in place. Shizzle, how the fuck am I gonna do that awkward bolt up? Fiddle, cant do it. Shizzle. Contemplate fucking it. Right fuck it. Put other 2 bolts on. Retry lifting unit up to ram screwdriver in. Works. Again watch car raise on its suspension, back hurting from lifting. Fucking bolt wont go in its hole. Shizzle. Dark and cold and pissed off. Bingo gets in. Tigten. So back on goes the grill surround followed by the grill. Then back in go the indicators and into the car I jump. Engine start, headlights on. Get out of car stand back and admire job well done.

Theres a take away near here called Mi Mi's. Or it was, the name seems to have been taken away, but will always live in our hearts as Mi Mi's.

Curiously, its now called "Pizzeria and Hebab House"...

Well just done my first Slippery Elm and Betadine thing on my arm - to combat the swelling due to lack of drainage on the lower surface bar.



It aint pretty. The iodine in the betadine stains your skin and looks like blood, while the slippery elm looks and feels like snot. Still its supposed to do the trick

haha I'm a member of BME and right now my ugly mug appears in the Lip main page of the Piercing Section.

My tor(mentor) should recognise the photo - he took the dam thing and readers here should cos it was the first 1312.jpg.

Shizzle is, way back when, it says I got Labrets and I'm in the "double and multi labrets" section rather than the Lowbrets section; - I did put that in the email sent with the picture. Hmph!

I have free member ship to BME till August this year - submitted that pic and a story of my Lowbrets being done.

I officially rock right now :-)

Famous steeplejack Fred Dibner is the man.

When people generally think of Boltoners people cum over Peter Kay and Dave Spikey (or Sparkey, shouts to Big Balls there)

Local knowledge (and the thing I read an interview thing in a magazine in a dentist) tells me that neither of those live in Bolton. They live in Chorley (so G to tha, get your spoons out..)

Sara Cox (should be busy suckin rather constantly yappin) and Vernon Kay dont live in Bolton either.

Fred Didner still lives in Bolton. And hes the man.

Though he has just said on tv "if you want a 6" screw, I have plenty" haha :-)

You may find these amusing - I certainly did. I hate forwarded email as much as anyone, esp. because most of it I've seen before.

Recently I've started to reply and comment on the forward sent to me by being a big twat and hitting "reply all".

(quite comedically the reply all group invloved in this forwarded email included the girl at colleges own mother)

I was just checking up on the Market Street Mincers message board string, who, I'm fairly sure has disspeared.

The conclusions there appear that hes dissapeared too, which is a shame. But a posting by "Dave" on "20 October 2003 - 2:59:21 PM" raises: "the fabled 9p tramp and the tramp who walks up and down oxford road lashing out and waggling his finger in a 'WHO WANTS SOME!?' kinda way".

The 9p tramp might be the infamous Lenin I've rant about and the Oxford Road tramp I'm pretty sure is the 3 step, hop skip step, wiggle finger in a menacing way fella who I'm sure you must of seen my impression of (if you know me).

Yes! I'm really not the only one to notice these people..

Hmm this or that?

Well tommorow I go to get a fancy hair do and be a model for Nicky Clarke in town.

Not sure what a Nicky Clarke is? Dont worry - I didnt know till I walked past one. My hair dresser is going to be Hayley (I think) and all I gotta do for a free hair cut is have some photos taken afterwards. Easy peasy.

The plan is not to come out looking pretencious or gay. So I'll probably end up with a trim then....

After a period of instability its time to slowly get this show back on the road.