Tuesday Rant

Just went into the city centre for lunch. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Some days Glasgow looks fantastic. On other days, it looks like the mutant scene from that particularly schonky Arnie Mars based movie, Total Recall. I am now downing vodka smoothies to numb the violence of the recollection of the drooling horrors. It looks like the circus came to town, stayed, and had lots of tadpoles. It's possible that sometime in the '70s there was a nuclear attack and we are all blanking it. It's equally possible that we are in the matrix and someone is playing a hugely cruel joke.
Worst case scenario, this is real life, the muttering man talking to his burger as he bumbled down the street colliding with everything is real. The vastly over weight man who was spinning a basketball on his finger with his planetoid sized girlfriend looking on were real. All the too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, freak show escapees are real and normal and it is me that is having a crisis. I have lost concentration and in that moment my standards crept up and now I am shocked. After I get past the shallow judgements of peoples physical peculiarities, I am left with the other horrors. The fact that society still has casualties littering our streets dependant on our all too wanting compassion simply to eat. It's no wonder they drink. Our Earth's populous are obsessed with vengeance whilst claiming moral superiority, our politicians are clambering over themselves to condemn acts of compassion that their religions place as the foundations of their faith. Those in power will manipulate political instabilities to promote civil war in order to sell guns so they can buy a bigger yacht and increase the value of their shares in pharmaceuticals. And it's all so futile and so wretched that the cattle, you and I, despair and sometimes lose concentration and rise to outrage.

This is the shit that tocsin should be outraged about.

Halfords - why they are a terrible bike store

They don't let you try out the bike before you buy it!!!
We bought a bike from Halfords recently, and aside from the gear changers, I think it is an ok bike. It arrived badly set up. the brakes dragged and the gears hadn't been properly adjusted and the chain went into the spokes. Not really an acceptable set up.
Simply, if the bike shop you go to won't let you try the bike, go somewhere else!!!

that advert for glade air freshener, with the kid who has poo issues. Don't buy glade, put the dysfunctional brat up for adoption. Obviously the kid is pretty smelly, so you might want to try charcoal biscuits first. But whilst you are doing that, you might want to get the paperwork in order.

The special K advert. mini breaks. how weird does her hair look? Now, if you put a spike through her head (you can tell i've thought about this, can't you?)on the horizontal plane, then how come her head is constantly tilted at 10 degrees above the horizontal? How smug is that woman? I'm going to buy some cake. Or a competitor's low calorie bland snack.

living with the music

ok, i bought both CDs.

The La Roux one has a couple of tracks I will listen to if I know no one can hear. Lyrically a bit naive and simplistic. It's competent pop music, but it is pop music.

The Florence and the Machine CD, "Lungs" is just very good. Very very good. It's just a bit more mature and sophisticated in it's lyrics and lyrical styling. For me it hits a lot of spots. Like a cross between the wedding present and...?

Dreadful confessions...

For months I have been HATING La Roux. I've been hearing that ear straining caterwauling EVERYWHERE and...
Well, something happened. I think I heard another track and I liked it. Very minimal keyboards, very eighties. So big fat hippo has changed his spots. My best friends would testify that I have prior for liking crap, so make your own judgements. I think it was seeing the advert for Florence and the Machine and La Roux back to back. I'd already said I liked a track by Florence and the Machine, "Rabbit heart" apparently. Anyway, as testament to my ability to back pedal and admit I've got different pyjamas, I'm buying some CDs tomorrow. Another weird thing is that since a few stores went to the wall, unless I simply can't get it in a shop, or it really is prohibitively expensive, I'm more inclined toward going to a shop.

Was out playing on my bike last Thursday. Playing on stairs and learning to pull the bike into the air to get over stuff that is there (glass) and stuff that technically isn’t there (potholes). Need practice but was lots of fun. Managed to fall over going up an incline, was fine coming down though.

Put eeebuntu on my Asus and it’s such an improvement. Only gripe is I’d have preferred a KDE environment, but I’m happy to live with Ubuntu based system.

The Scottish Cycle Cross series visited Cathkin Braes on Sunday. That was fun. Good track and nice to see the Braes being filled with families just having a damn good day out.

Recent exception to the new shopping rule was a pair of Shimano MP66W shoes which were £60 in Alpine Bikes and £45 on Wiggle.co.uk
They look quite mad, if I could get my hair to slope up at an odd angle and wear strange cyber clothes, I'd feel like I was in a Manga cartoon.

Yes; exactly.