Head lice is art.... apparently

according to seven German artists who have deliberately infested their heads with them under the dubious title of "hosts" they have even thought "ahead" and put head scarves on to stop them spreading to the general public as joe public pay to view this wonderfully thought out and frankly brilliant idea (rolls eyes)


or as one of the arty cooties said

"Art is no longer a painting on a wall.... art is life, life is art"

it's almost as bad as that other nut case who had a human ear grafted on his arm, or that other pretentious prat who masterminded that crack in the floor painstakingly created in an art gallery in concrete for a few hundred thousand pounds signifying the division of something or other..... no it's not... it's a very badly laid floor and a trip hazard ..... you idiot....!!! (or are we the idiots for allowing it to happen ?)

and I'm sure most of the people who do have head lice / lice wouldn't consider their plight "art" ... life possibly but not art ....and would no doubt love the opportunity to rid themselves of their parasites, and here we have seven barking mad box head blithering idiots breeding the little illegitimates for the sake of their so called art ....

four words

GET A BLOODY JOB !!!

I'm secretly hoping they will breed exponentially during the term of their display of this piece, and that the said lice will over power them and hopefully suck out their bloody brains as well, alas this probably won't happen because anybody with enough brains in the first place wouldn't dream of playing host to several hundred blood sucking parasites....

I despair I really do......

ps/ and speaking of idiots is Gordon Brown still here ? and worse still diesel is up to £1.23 a litre in Carmarthen... the two are probably related, and speaking of Politicians it always reminds me of that joke about Estate Agents

"what do you call 10 Estate Agents at the bottom of the North Atlantic trench ??"
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A good start ;¬)

Fishing done, Pug done......Next !!!

Myself and the drowning kitten went fishing yesterday, after buying my rod license of course @ £25 for a season !!! fortunately I didn't need a permit because the stretch of river we fish on is private and we have permission from the landowner which is cool :)

Anyway we didn't catch a solitary fish.... although I did get a few nibbles, but I think it's a bit early in the season to pull any out ... :(

and the Pug was repaired in about 10 minutes flat, wheel off, pinch bolt removed, and proper sized bolt put back in place... wheel back on and taken for a test drive.... it pops no more :)

AND I'm updating my blog from the newly installed "Hardy Heron" Ubuntu 8.04 on the laptop :).... it's brilliant, turns out "Gutsy Gibbon" on a Compaq Presario 2100 laptop doesn't do the upgrade path too well, but a fresh install it's faultless :¬)

So the roast dinner is on and we are sitting down and watching "Britain's Got Talent" but from what I've seen so far ......it doesn't ....

Are you sure this is the right size ?

I was obviously lying about no more Pug 205 repairs, thankfully its not a serious one, basically when I was refitting the pinch bolt on the bottom of the front nearside hub, I scored the bolt which in turn lost most of it's thread when I tightened it, no worries I thought I'll put in a different bolt..... unfortunately it was about 1mm less in diameter which is causing the lower ball joint to "pop" over the bolt... it's safe because the only way the lower ball joint could actually come out is with a crow bar on top of it because it's under a great deal of pressure from the anti roll bar.... but it needs to be done before Andrea drives up to Liverpool next week... there is no point in taking the Jeep because we would have to take out a bank loan to fill the damn thing up these days....hence why it's only being used for local journeys....

I was hoping to get some fishing in this weekend, and who knows I might actually manage it, I will of course take the drowning kitten with me (in-joke....you would have to have been there to appreciate it, lets just say it involved a swimming pool in Haven Holidays rip off village), he really enjoys fishing, which reminds me I must get some worms, and preferably "depressed and suicidal" ones that impale themselves on the hook to save him the horror of impaling them himself, because I've told him if he doesn't do it nobody else will !!!

anyway the next bit is rather Geeky so either stop reading now or :-

*SET Geek Mode ON *

The only other thing of note is that I have managed to break the laptop operating system wise, I went for the on-line upgrade of Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy heron) and it said it was going to take a few hours to complete via broadband so I aborted and decided to upgrade via the freshly burned ISO image I had downloaded..... mistake number one.....oh woe is me, in aborting the upgrade I broke something... so it's a complete fresh install now, hopefully I can get it back to what it was, we shall see.... So I will be sitting in the lounge tonight with a glass of wine making tutting sounds, and completely ignoring my lovely wife as she realises I am a lost cause conversation wise..... that is until I nail the Ubuntu install on the laptop.... I'll get the drowning kitten to keep filling her glass up, she won't care by the third one, and I'll probably roll into bed at 2am having either fixed it triumphantly or completely broken it.....again.... but despite this early teething problem on the new release, it's a killer operating system, extremely fast and it looks fantastic !!! it certainly gives Vista/XP a run for it's money... Linux has finally come of age... but the really geeky thing I like about this particular release of Ubuntu is it's ability to be installed while running XP/VISTA as a normal windows application....it uses the NTFS file system rather well using Wabi, so gone are the days of dangerous and rather sweaty re-partitioning guesswork in the hope that your XP partition remains intact after Linux has installed !!!

*SET Geek Mode OFF*

anyway that's pretttttty much my weekend laid out, hope you have a good one !!

Not that Russians are hard or anything ;¬)

A Russian man trying to sleep off a night of after-work drinking failed to notice a six-inch (15-cm) knife in his back - until his wife woke him up.

Yuri Lyalin, 53, took a bus home, ate breakfast and apparently slept like a baby before his spouse noticed a handle sticking out of his back.

He was rushed to casualty but doctors found no vital organs damaged.

Mr Lyalin shrugged the episode off but the drinking partner who stabbed him faces trial, Russian media report.

"Unique and intriguing the case may be, but the accused faces a severe punishment," said Pavel Vorobyov, a deputy prosecutor in the northern city of Vologda.

'We were drinking'

Mr Lyalin, an electrician, had spent the evening drinking with a watchman at his workplace when they got into an argument, Interfax news agency reports.

The morning found him waking up in the watchman's office but instead of going back to work, he decided to take the bus home.

At home, Mr Lyalin had some sausage from the fridge and lay down to sleep, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper says.

After a couple of hours, his wife noticed the handle sticking out of his back and called an ambulance.

Viktor Belov, a surgeon who treated him, found a kitchen knife in Mr Lyalin's back but "by good fortune, it had gone through soft tissue without touching vital organs".

His alleged attacker reported the crime to the police himself, Interfax adds. Mr Lyalin apparently feels fine and bears no ill-will.

"We were drinking and what doesn't happen when you're drunk?" he was quoted by Komsomolskaya Pravda as saying.

click here for original story on the BBC news website

What a brilliant weekend !!

I was faced with the choice of being over run by 10 teenage girls as it was my step daughters belated birthday party this weekend or a trip up to see my friends up in North Wales....

Needless to say no sooner had Andrea said "you could go visit Chris & Donna" I was speed dialling Chris and arranging my weekend pass, I left at around 6:30pm on Friday night and was up there by 10pm ish, it was a hellish drive up there, I think the local farmers had a relay set up and were throwing tractors in front of me....

"damn he got past !!! quick throw another two in front of him AND a combine harvester !!!"

Anyway I got up there (eventually) said my hellos after getting mobbed by the kids, thankfully the youngest lad who calls me Uncle Duhweck is now above groin height, so his kinetic energy and inertia of the impact is absorbed above the belt not below as was usually the case.....anyway shortly afterwards I turned in......

Next day I had a bit of time to kill because Chris was at work, so played the kids and Donna on the Wii, I thrashed Donna on the shooting, but that was easy because she has the reactions of a slug on valium....but it was a different matter when her daughter challenged me to boxing, I got knocked out that many times I could tell you what pattern the canvas was in exacting detail ..... kids eh ?

so about 3pm I set off to visit the old haunts, I dropped in on Euros and Catrins place, well I say place, it's actually called Lleweni Hall, they have opened up a farm shop and I've got to be honest they have done a brilliant job of it, and Catrin makes a mean cup of coffee on their single phase Italian coffee machine.... the place has been transformed from when I was first introduced to the place... good on them :) they seem to be getting bookings and apparently I hear next year the British Antarctic survey team have booked the hall for winter survival training, which is far cheaper than actually sending the team to the Antarctic and of course considerably colder ;¬) you honestly couldn't meet a nicer couple of people than Euros and Catrin, despite the fact that they have lost almost all of their extremities to frostbite over the years ;¬)

Joking aside, it was lovely seeing them both again neither of them have changed that much Euros still dry as a bone, and Catrin well she is just far too lovely for Euros ;¬)

We arranged to meet up that night with Chris and had a lovely meal at a pub (Catrin sensibly decided to stay away, not that she has EVER been the nominated driver of a bunch of drunken idiots before....) which meant the beer had to be restricted as we were all driving (well two of us anyway Chris rarely drives these days ;¬) ) but even so we had a laugh, even if I did have to jab Chris in the ribs a few times as he had already upset the barmaid... mind you she was a shining example of how not to treat customers and had a jib on her like the back end of a sow ;¬)

it was really nice seeing everybody again.... alas Geraint wasn't there, but he is currently arguing the benefits of rule under Margaret Thatcher to the unwashed hordes in Edinburgh.... it's unlikely we will ever see him again (alive)..... I mean the man can brew a wicked pint of beer but his political views are a bit off the mark, and arguing that Margaret Thatcher was the best thing since sliced bread to a person of Scottish persuasion is a bit like saying Gordon Brown was the best Chancellor since Adolf Hitler

so all in all it was a partial re-union of "band-y-gegin" :)

all that I am now trying to figure out is why it took 1/2 a tank of petrol to get up there and less than 1/8th of a tank to get back, my only solution so far is that it's all downhill from North Wales :¬)

A convenient lie or an inconvenient truth ?

I've just been reading "the register" which casts a withering eyeball at various things in the world, the latest being that the global warming (bandwagon/cash cow) crisis has not, as promised warmed the planet because of C02, in fact since 1997 there has been no noticeable warming of the planet during that time, and because of the "el nina" effect the planet has actually cooled slightly

couple that with an equally contradictory report on the HM-Treasury website

it makes you wonder who you should believe, on the one hand you have the rabid eco-warriors and scientists on the gravy train who predict doom and gloom, and on the other you have the scientists who say this is a perfectly natural variance in sunspot activity.....

personally I tend not to believe computer modelling on climate change, it is after all fed data by humans, created by humans, and then makes assumptions based on human programming, it is after all a simulation, and a simulation based on very shaky and limited data

the earth has suffered far more cataclysmic disasters way above any scale humans could inflict upon it and it has survived for billions of years, man's appearance on earth is just a few seconds in time, and our industrial revolution a few nanoseconds of those few seconds, I think it is foolish to believe that man is so important to the earth's ecology to radically effect it's climate...

we do however seem to have a knack of destroying our environment, corals dying, rainforests destroyed, we certainly don't help our case

I do think that we have had "some" impact on climate, but to blame man for the melting ice caps is pure lunacy, simply because the ice caps have been advancing and retreating for millennia way before man set foot on this planet in his present form, and yes some parts of the ice caps are melting, but others are getting bigger, this world has been balancing itself for billions of years.... I think it has the hang of it by now

Anyway the report on the HM Treasury website makes interesting reading, there they are taxing us to death to "supposedly" make us greener..... and they produce a report which says they are wrong !!! since when did charging people money clean up anything ? especially when they don't ring fence the money for green issues they simply prop up a welfare system or syphon it off to finance an ailing building society which laughably called itself "Northern Rock" I personally would applaud it's corporate identity being changed to "Northern Sponge"

This country is heading for the bumpers, especially since I saw Diesel for sale at £1.21 a litre this morning, they think up new taxes it seems at the drop of a hat, abolish tax breaks for the less well off.... the love of money is the root of all evil it is said.... and if there is a problem throw some at it, or better still employ some completely useless highly paid stuffed shirts to form a committee, waste some time ..... ohhh lets say lets spend a few years on the gravy train .... then throw some money at it.... wait a few years.... ooops that didn't work lets have an enquiry ... can we have some more stuffed shirts please.... preferably without too much gravy on them ?

and don't get me started on Politicians and their expense claims.... I think we should tax them on oxygen usage, because they waste so much of it !!! and whoever elected Gordon Brown to be Prime minister should be run over by a bio diesel powered bus.... oooops sorry I forgot nobody elected him did they, we seem to have inherited him by default.....get out !!! .......... NEXT !!!!

I had a bit of a Wallace and Gromit moment this morning

or should I say "close shave"....

I was happily driving up the A48 out of Carmarthen in pouring rain at stupid o'clock to get to work for the 8am shift in Swansea... minding my own business and busily trying to prop matchsticks under my eyelids..... when I passed two gritting lorries grinding up the hill fully laden with road salt.... strange I thought...hardly sub zero temperatures for them to be out and about....... anyway there were about six cars in front of me and just as I got over the brow of Nant-y-Caws, I saw the flashing blue lights ahead in the distance.... I immediately thought a car accident, and as I got closer I realised why, the whole of the top of Nant-y-Caws on the A48 was a mixture of black ice and ice slurry... the car which was three cars in front of me hit the brakes........big mistake on her part...nice car though.....

right up until the resultant and very spectacular spin off the road which was only surpassed when dancing on ice was on the TV and Bonnie Langford dented the ice with her head...but less funny ...obviously.... needless to say it really ruins the shine on your car hitting the crash barriers at any speed .... and ohhh those nasty bolts and everything, will take more than a bottle of T-Cut to solve that one madam !!! ;¬).... she was fine..... if a little 007 and Martini'd by it (shaken ....not stirred)

anyway myself and the driver in front of me carried on ....in a gut wrenching straight line (almost) not touching the brakes once, there wasn't any need to stop (like we could anyway ????) as there were already two ambulances and three police cars in attendance from a previous driver who had tripped the light fantastic after hitting the black ice and discovered that no amount of fancy ABS traction control or four wheel drive could save him from stoving in his nice shiny new car, and it does make me laugh how they get out of their bashed in car and scratch their heads.... as if they don't know why it happened ..... that's called a dose of reality mate !!.... I actually remember him shooting past me just before the Tenby road services....going like the clappers......just before I filled up with Petrol at the very same garage....

So all safe just a very slight adrenaline rush in the early hours of this morning.....topped up with a few fresh coffee's at work.... :)

The only other thing is that it's my step daughters birthday party tonight she has made it to 14 !!! so chocolate fountain charged, marsh mallows at the ready.... I think I'll just stick to a few beers and keep out of the way, last thing I want is a bunch of giggling teenagers running amok after a slow day at the office .........then of course it's my better half's birthday on Sunday... I'm completely prepared for it of course ;¬)

now where is that rabbit and top hat I set aside for such things.....

The dangers of different wine....

Now I can drink Rioja till the cows come home and have no ill effects the next morning, you usually pay more for it but it's worth it.....Anyway last two times we indulged in some different wine.... I reserve saying it was good because although it went down without wincing as you do with some wines, which would be better off sprinkling on your chips, this one had an awful effect on your brain the next morning, I mean you wouldn't really expect to have a hangover after a few glasses of wine would you ?

Well this stuff must have been fortified with brake fluid, we both woke up with banging headaches, and it's not as if it was cheap either, but we shall be staying away from South African "Namuqua" <--- possibly spelt wrong.... because it costs more in paracetamol than it's worth, anyway we confirmed it the other night when the wine box was finished off...we shall not be going there again

My step daughters birthday present has been reserved, I say reserved because it's not actually released until June 2008, it's a new laptop...(-ish), but not in the conventional sense, there is no way we could afford to blow £300+ on a proper one for anybody, myself included..... and I'm having a new one before ANYBODY else does....it's a linux powered flash memory Bluetooth with Wifi connectivity PDA/Tablet/notebook thingy, it has everything on it she uses currently including MSN and internet connectivity with browser and flash plugins for the dubious "YouTube" plus she will be able to connect her Viewty phone to it via Bluetooth.... but probably the best thing of all things for her ...IT'S PINK !!! I can write about it on here because we consulted her before committing to getting one, apparently they will be all the rage, and only 200,000 are being made for distribution worldwide, so they have a "bit" of exclusivity about them.

It's called the Elonex One...It has an amazing 4 hours battery life, and is practically indestructible, which is always a good thing where my step daughter is concerned (aka .."what did your last electronic gizmo die of ?" ) plus I won't ever have to "repair" it once she has fiddled/hit/dropped/thrown it...and like all things linux... It just works, plus it will stop her from asking to ab"use" the real laptop which is too heavy to throw, but has been dropped once.... ;¬).... or in our house "what don't you understand about NO ! the N or the O ?"....."but pleaseeeeeeeeee" ....."NO !!" ..... ad nauseum ;¬)

I think Freya is starting to come out of the woods with this wheezing, although she will probably prove me wrong once I get home tonight, she woke us both up this morning at 4am ish "ahhhhhhh'ing" and "cooing" and "gurgling" in her cot until one of us got her out, but it's hard to be annoyed with her when she flashes a big beaming smile at you :).... even if it is 4am and you feel like death warmed up....which I did after being thrown all over the mats last night at Aikido

let it snow, let it snow .....let it snow :¬)

We woke up this morning to a minuscule covering of snow, it melted quickly once the sun came up ....unfortunately but was nice seeing it as we really haven't had any this/last year..... it's bright sunshine now, with the odd flurry of snow, apparently it's going to hit us again at 10pm tonight, but who knows :)

and I know I said I wouldn't mention my grease monkeying again, but today I've been out in the workshop underneath the Pug (again) changing both of the lower suspension wishbone arm / ball joints... because you can't buy a ball joint you have to buy the whole assembly :¬( unfortunately ... but it only took me a few hours today I had to abort doing it last night because I lost all strength in my arms wrenching and hammering the left hand side one out whilst I was upside down under the car, thankfully the right hand side one came out textbook and the new one put in with no trouble at all.... :¬)


and still only £23 each, would have cost me a fortune at the garage.... and it's cured the wobble at 70mph and the steering is a lot more positive now, plus it might have been an MOT failure which is due soon, so best to do it now rather than wait for a failure.... the car is fine now, hopefully that's it.....famous last words....

The only other thing of note is that Freya is still coughing like a demon, the only way I can describe it is you know those small bears you turn upside down and they make a sort of growling sound as you put them the right way up, well that's not far off it, although her nose has started to stream now.... so hopefully it's starting to clear...fingers crossed :)

The littlest lad is itching to get out fishing again since we went to Lidl and bought a fishing tackle box completely stocked (2 actually, one for me one for him) with all sorts of gear, it was only £9.99 but I estimated the amount of fishing tackle they put in it, if we had bought it at the local fishing shop it would have been up in the low £80's maybe more, considering the paternosters and the amount of lead shot with hooks would have cost £9.99 and the box has 10 times that amount, it even has night fishing glow sticks to attract the fish, I think he has visions of emptying our river of trout over the next few weeks..... we shall see.... I think his beginners luck will run out this season but hopefully not to the extent that he loses interest

and now I'm off to soak my bones in a nice hot bath..... because I smell like an oily rag toasting in front of a warm fire....

Normality returns

Freya is out of hospital now, she was let out this afternoon she isn't much better wheezing wise and the bronchial dilators have been stopped because they were doing bugger all for her, and possibly just making her worse.... lovely to have them both back, staying in hospital is not the best of past times, but the children's ward in Glangwili is brilliant and the staff fantastic :).....

So back to work tomorrow, after my two day break, I'm not sure if I prefer working in IT or looking after kids, computers are far simpler to cope with and less demanding, that's for sure...

and I've just found out a random fact, your 1lb jar of honey you buy in the supermarket is equivalent to 55,000 miles flown by bees (well it would hardly be caribou honey, if you think about it !!) or basically twice around the world... who would have thought ? that will be filed away now, and brought out during a stilted conversation in some pub in the future ;¬)

The only other news is of my ex girlfriend, (we are still in contact and get on as friends very well) has finally been accepted for training as a paramedic, she is already a trainer for mountain first aid courses, but she forgot about the actual driving of the ambulance, and considering she has never driven anything bigger than a car, and is quite possibly the worst parallel parker on the planet, she is probably going to cause more damage to parked vehicles getting to the scene of the accident...... I hope the local NHS is heavily insured ;¬)

seriously though she will make an excellent paramedic and I wish her well in following her dream :¬) just don't park your car anywhere near any ambulance stations in Coventry on Saturday ;¬)

Some good news.....and some bad news....

Freya is in hospital tonight :( with bronchiolitis, thankfully it's not that serious but she has had a wheezy chest for about 3 weeks now.... she went to the doctors last week after her chest hadn't cleared after a cold she had and didn't seem to be getting any better, and the doctor put her on Ventolin which did absolutely nothing for her, anyway we both decided she should go back to the doctor this morning and she did, the doctor immediately wanted her admitted to hospital, because it obviously wasn't getting any better....

So I drove back from work, they were very good about it I must say, and Andrea and I took her into hospital, she had some SATS taken and her oxygen level was fine, but obviously something needed doing to ease her breathing, so they decided to keep her in overnight and keep her under observation ... and possibly try different bronchial dilators on her....

I then had to come home and look after the other kids, so a tuna pasta bacon bake (weird combo I know but it strangely works very well....it's home pride brand but you have to add the tuna yourself ;¬) ) was initiated and enjoyed by all, my step daughter is staying at a friends tonight so that made things easy food wise as she only eats rice and cardboard chicken ...... not that she is a fussy eater or anything...... heaven forbid !!!

the only other thing of note was Andrea's ex husband (I won't use his name because I don't have his permission to use it on here, just like I don't use the other kids names either) ringing up initially I presume to talk to the kids and I think the xbox recluse told him Freya was in hospital.....anyway he offered to come up and look after the kids, which I thought was a lovely thing to say, considering we don't exactly see eye to eye (as he stated.....twice....;¬) ) , but fair do's to him for offering, I explained that she would "probably " be out tomorrow so there wouldn't be any need , but thanked him for making the gesture.. it was really nice and was appreciated :¬)

if only my ex was as accommodating...... damn I forgot she always was....... just not with me .... ;¬)