Stargate Universe

incredible.

Sir Robot Wars

Sir Bobby will always be alive for me because I'll constantly compare other managers and situations to him and how he would have reacted. "What would Sir Bobby have said there?" I will ask myself.
He won't be able to answer. That's our loss. But I know what he would do. He'd do the right thing. That knowledge is our gain.

Such invaluable knowledge. I feel all my future decisions will be much easier, full in the knowledge that Sir Bobbot would have done The Right Thing [tm].

What's that whirring sound?

That's right, it's the English language spinning in it's grave. Today Jonathan 'Robot Wars' 'Stuart' Pearce melted his brains all over the BBC Sport website. He was trying to talk about Emmanuel Adebayor's celebration at COMS, but instead, I can only assume his motherboard shorted out and we were left with this:

"On this day in 1982 Princess Grace of Monaco died ridiculously young after a car crash. That was a genuine tragedy.

Sixty-nine years ago this week the Battle of Britain was won. Hitler postponed Operation Sealion - the planned invasion of these shores. That was true victory.

Sporting triumph and disaster should never mirror real life but we have created twin monsters of those two impostors. So should we be horrified at Emmanuel Adebayor's excesses?"

What is this garbage? I just have no understanding of what it's meant to be. Why are tragedy and victory "imposters", or "monsters"? It's never explained. What do triumph and tragedy have to do with Manu Bayo's "excesses"? It is a mystery.



Pearce can't help himself though, signing off with this unfathomable stream of nonsense:

"If we and Adebayor could treat the impostors of triumph and disaster the same, ours would be "the earth and everything that's in it", as Kipling would say - and "which is more" Adebayor would be "a man, my son!" "

Please if anybody can decipher this can you ring me on 0800 ROBOT WARS and leave your name and number. If you do that, ours would be "the earth and everything that's in it", as Lawro might beguile.

Pearce's mind seems to have died. It's almost as if he started with the 3 bizarre references, to Monaco, Hitler and Kipling, and fitted everything else in around it. Substitute the quotes for something equally unrelated and there's very little difference:

"If we and Adebayor could treat the impostors of triumph and disaster the same, "this will end in disappointment for one party", as Champion would say - and "in a party" Adebayor would be "knocks here!" "

So in conclusion, weep for the soul of the dear departed Pearce, he has clearly lost his marbles, or at least his team sheet, because there are substitutes available, but he's chosen not to use them!

Red Cross Continues

Today we cleared out the back cupboard a bit and found a few interesting things. It's blatently obvious things are allowed to get old and have been around for a hell of a time, but well..

We found three very old massive books, describing anatomy, which were written in 1859 and 1869. Looking at the drawings, you saw how wonderfully detailled and well drawn they were, and then also, you noticed something sticking out of them.

"What's that?"

And we noticed they were hooks and chains.

Page 1

Page 2

The descriptions next to the drawings said of cutting the bodies open, and describing the visual appearence of a dead body. It seems the drawings were made of the dead bodies whilst being studied.

That was fascinating enough, but it gets.. different.

My friend mentioned that as a child the boss had this box of fake bones that she'd give to the children to scare them, and say about how she was secretly a grave-digger and so forth. Sounded awesome, so the box was found.

I took the bones out of the box, and looked at them. They were incredibly realistic.. amazingly detailed, you could see between the bones where they were cracked, and sawn.. and..

"..these are real bones."

There was even a cigarette box with finger bones in it. If they were fakes, I just.. couldn't fault them, the most realistic looking bones I've ever seen in my life and I'm willing to swear they were bones.

Then, we found a piece of withered paper at the bottom of the box. I can't remember the exact words, but it was a flyer from a shop in London from the 19th century. It described various bones of the body, saying all were available, and then said "We buy or sell bones."

..I washed my hands not long after that. I would have taken a photo but I'm so genuinely convinced that they were real bones I wanted to respect the dead.

how embarrasing

Work parties - gotta love em'.

A few days ago I was fortuanate enough to mark my last day in London with a boat party down the Thames with my fellow work colleagues and the client of the project. With the food being laden on and an open bar available, it was set to be a great evening of banter and awkward non-work work related chat, while soaking in the sights and sounds on London from the viewpoint of the river.

The boat itself was a beast and had a massive rear deck for people to stand out on and enjoy the atmosphere, which was great until an unfortunate_occurrence was bestowed upon me as I returned to the inner section of the vessel to get a drink.

In my haste to get inside, I had failed to see a tiny 2" tall ridge that separates the inside and outside of the boat (and presumably lets the windows slide shut) leading me to trip and fall forward flat on my face.

In front of everyone

100 people

:' {

gf's guide to helping your fellow beings

There's no one else out there, lets face it, we're a small ball of rock floating around the sea of nothingness we call the universe. So we just have each other to deal with, connecting only through the means of language and laughter.

Unfortunately this act of human to human communication and etiquette seems to have passed me by on many occasions and I've managed to get myself in situations that I still regret to this day. You see, when a fellow unknown_entity approaches you in the hope that you will exchange your time to help them in their plight, it's probably a good idea you happily oblige. Like any normal human being would do.

However, this didn't seem to happen on one fateful night in our very own London-town, whilst walking along the much maligned southbank of the Thames, some young, supple American tourists approached us with a sense of hope and joy in their eyes. Their question was simple, being tourists in England, they had concerns about their fanny-packs being poked and robbed so they were wondering where they could get a Taxicab to transport them safely back to their intended destination.

The people I was with simply passed off the question with a polite "we're not local to here!" shrug and had already taken their first strides away, a universal message of indifference that is acceptable and uniformly English. Unfortunately for some reason I decided not to head down this route of politeness and courtesy, the thought processes in my brain had decided to push for the desire to help my new found foreign friends towards their goal. An amateur error in hindsight as the five word response that escaped my mouth was as follows

- "how about trying a road?"

The hopes, the dreams and the image of the modern English man washed away in the deep recesses of their eyes, the silence that followed was the most awful, haunting sound that still distresses me to this day. In this state of shock I began a brisk walk away from the crowd who were still trying to grasp the situation that had just occurred, the thought of apologising for my sarcastic and wholly unhelpful comment had never crossed my mind.

Perhaps the lesson is to pass on the help to someone who knows more or communicates better, but never, under any circumstances, ask your old buddy gf for help

it will only end in tears :' {

Following on from Red Cross

The guy that saved the girl's life that I helped came into Red Cross last Monday to just show us the sort of things that we could learn for becoming an Emergency Care Practitioner, and he started talking about plastic airways that are used to shove down someone's throat (I'm not trained) in order to support staying alive.

The ECP said about using airways, and in typical V (the old woman boss) style she kept commenting and interrupting him and said "Oh yes I have those"

He lowered his eyebrows a little, and rightly so because we don't have any, and asked "You do?"

"Yes we have one."

"You'd need more than one, they're in different sizes."

"Oh, we have one in every bag."

He then further explained about their use, whilst she said "Mm." over and over.

I am genuinely concerned. He said to me quietly outside that he isn't sure about coming any more, he's worried about upsetting her.

My Bonzai Tree

Here’s a quick story

I bought a bonzai tree, and named it Tuzba (I like the name.) Anyway, I was looking after it reasonably well, then I got moody for a few days and I didn’t water it in time. I tried to keep it going and it was just going brown and crap.

However, the root was beginning to sprout a bit, so whilst I was away (I travel with my tree, it’s no wonder it died) I dug it all out and cut out the seedling. I did it pretty well to be fair, kept lots of little roots and this tiny little green thing that was growing.

So I replanted that, and I’ve been watering it and it’s been growing fine and today I think I’ve worked out that I’m actually growing a blade of grass from a wild grass seed that came in through the window.

RIP Tuzba.