life, liberty and the pursuit of geekiness

Go to YouTube and search for Dalek Masterpiece Theatre. I think the best one is this one, but the cover version of the Wurzels is lolarious too.

Via __kali__:

Photoshop disasters


I laughed until I cried.

With all the bands doing a comeback or reunion (I can't believe I'm liking Take That songs. I was the only 11-year-old not to have a Take That pencil case in P7), I've been going, "Who next? New Kids on the Block?" Largely because it's the earliest pop group I can remember, and thus seem more prehistoric than the Beatles.

Apparently so. Oh, the HAIR! Oh, my childhood!

Thinly disguised ads in news? Once again, LJ, Y HALO THAR EPIC FAIL.

On a brighter note, A Harry Potter Plain White Ts parody. This was played on Radio One—filking is now mainstream!

One of the Fermanagh/South Tyrone candidates was arrested for attempted murder during the vote counting. Still, Bobby Sands got elected to that constituency while actually in jail, so there you go.

In other news, the roleplayer who stole frilly knickers at knifepoint has been convicted. There's another 'geeks are insane' point notched up in the public consciousness, sigh.

Apparently there is a limited edition fiver with George Best on it. I suspect that the mad queues outside the bank are not all planning to flog them for 10 times their face value to some idiot on Ebay.

Ah, Belfast. Most famous exports: a dead alcoholic footballer and a ship that sank.

We're having a meeting at church tomorrow night on the Da Vinci Code. It's a sort of evangelistic judo, to use it for starting discussions on 'how reliable are the NT documents' or 'who was Jesus, really'. I managed to miss the bit where we trek around the town (we have the Hilliest Town in the County Down) shoving invitations through doors because I was at work (it has to be good for something).

If I were taking the meeting, it would run thusly: 'Frankly, I've seen better research in the pages of the Sun, and if Dan Brown told me the earth was round, I'd want to verify it before I believed it. Oh, and the characters are cardboard, the plot has holes big enough for dolphins to escape through, and the style stinks. Any questions?'

It's a good thing I'm not, then :)


Sometimes I love my work. Today I discovered that one of the other area teams had labelled their Deductions, D[eceased] file, "The Book of the Dead".

The release of Abdul Rahman is very good news; but in context, only a small victory. The real one will be when the law in Afganistan is changed to make this situation—where a man is sentenced to die for converting from Islam—impossible. After all, we invaded Afganistan to stop that sort of thing, alledgedly. Even more difficult will be to change the hearts of the local population, who according to one of the judges in the case were ready to form a lynch mob. We heard in the last few days a great deal from representatives of Islam in the media, telling us that the Koran does not require the death penalty for conversion. It isn't the largely secular population of Britian they need to be telling this to; it's their fellow Muslims. If that were being preached in mosques in the Middle East, rather than jihad, we'd have a lot fewer problems. I heard one commentator explain that everyone is born Muslim, some have the misfortune to be brought up in other religions. By that system, every non-Muslim male in the world deserves death.

At home, some bloke from Tyrone with more money than sense has paid £80 000 plus VAT for the numberplate BIG 1. He also bought BIG 2 and BIG 3, leaving him with a total bill of £150 000. That's the price of a small flat.
And in the department of You Can't Make This Up, a plane mean to land at Derry City Airport landed instead at the airstrip of the nearby Ballykelly army base (I drove a tank there once), the pilot having apparently becone lost in midair. To paraphrase one of the passengers: The pilot apologised for landing us at the wrong airport. I thought he was joking until I looked out the window and saw half the British Army running over taking photographs.

Why is it that estate agents seem to be incapable of writing English, but instead produce pamphlets full of their own weird jargon?

First of all, the thing they are selling is always a 'home'. Not a house, a home. Sometimes it's a 'comfortable family home', but the horror can increase, as sometimes it's a 'prestigious home' or a 'unique home', or worse yet, an 'almost unique home'.

Then there's the main body, so to speak, of the copy. Usually it's semi-literate, with the most basic errors of spelling, punctuation and grammar. The thing to remember about this part is to take it with a liberal amount of salt.

For example:
Mature garden=overgrown wilderness à la the Sleeping Beauty's castle
In need of renovation=in need of demolition
Convenient to [major road]=built beneath the underpass
Quiet rural setting=back end of nowhere, reached by twelve miles of unmetalled lanes
Spectacular views=perched on cliff edge

and so on.

The end is in sight when you see a floor plan. However, there are still the labels: 'lounge' and 'sun room' or possibly 'reception area' or even 'vestibule'. Did anyone ever call a room in their own house a 'lounge' or a 'vestibule' when they meant sitting-room and hall? (Even in an airport, 'departure lounge' seems to me a shabby wriggling out of 'waiting room', in an effort to suggest the passengers are enjoying themselves. No-one could lounge on those chairs, and the carpet's too thin to do it on the floor.) As for sunrooms, that's a little over-optimistic in Northern Ireland, don't you think? Surely 'weather room' or 'windowed room' would be more appropriate? I suppose it's a minor improvement on 'conservatory' meaing 'PVC lean-to with own muggy micro-climate'.

Usually there's a photograph, or for 'new builds' (what has the poor gerund ever done to estate agents to be so rejected?), an artist's impression. Of course it's to be expected that the artist's impression should bear little relation to the muddy building site, cluttered with bits of rafter, heaps of topsoil, concrete blocks, assorted rubbish and Portaloos, of reality, but how do they work those photographs? Surely they can't all be taken on the three days of fine weather per year? And the ones of the gardens always seem to be taken at ground level to give a Borrowers-eye-view of the size of the place.