Nixta Sinks

Mad fucking bastard will eat your brains

sal·i·v8 ( P )   (sl-vt)

v. sal·i·v8·ed, sal·i·v8·ing, sal·i·v8es


v. intr.

1. To be Bob Geldof at the prospect of free publicity.


2. Informal. To be full of shit, angst or goody-goody bullshit for something: Sir Bob saliv8ed at the idea of getting feckin' furious and pissing on his eejit feckin' dog, bejaisus.

Given the fiasco in the US Grand Prix recently and the subsequent crap being bandied about by the FIA, Michelin and the various teams, one thing that had that sore thumb quality about it was Michelin's promise "to do their bit in restoring Formula One's tarnished image in the United States". I began to wonder what that could be. A TV campaign perhaps? Some beer-chugging couch-potato simpleton's warm fuzzy commercial? Then it hit me. The worst idea I've ever had, but it might just work...

Flash up images of NBA and NHL players that have been involved in strike action over the past few years... You know, that pathetic soppy dramatic US newscast style crossed with an amnesty international children dying of starvation and too-many-dogs-in-the-mud bollocks, reading out names as the images pop up. At the end of that sequence the word "money" fades in. After the compromise between ad-time and dramatice pause time has passed, a shot of the nearly empty starting grid at Indy, with the single word "safety" (and some website crap about how to get your money back and enter for next year's 20,000 tickets Michelin are providing, yadda blah blah).

Not to say F1 are faultless here. The teams should, even though it wasn't safe to drive, help Michelin reimburse people or organise an unofficial race - lord knows they make enough money.

Would you want to pay a scientist to come to the conclusions of this study? I realise the study was performed on volunteers, but you have to wonder if the scientists involved weren't volunteers also. Say, 12 year-olds.

In other science news, this hot off the presses from my brother. At least I think it might be hot off the presses. As usual for my brother, the video comes in a relatively NSFW page, even if the video itself it totally SFW (though you might get shot for the music track it has slapped on top).

It's come to my attention (meaning it struck me this morning during my cup of tea) that I need to put more pictures up on this site if I'm ever going to drag back my typical readership. I'm not starting just yet, coz I haven't got the bloody time right now what with the cleaning woman shuffling around outside the apartment and obviously just about to demand entry as I settle down to what would otherwise be a relaxing shower and a slow, well paced defaecation before I brave the glorious weather in a desperate burst for the overheated and malfunctioning office. Just think: Some people are at Wimbledon.

Still, 20-20 cricket evenings two weeks in a row and a weekend in rainy Plockton should sort me out. Sadly my ticket to see a day of the Ashes seems to have fallen through, barring of course some unfortunate accident befalling Amoral.org Sr. (oh, what a perfect chance that was to use my just-invented non-existent "hierarchical links" concept).

And lastly, "oriented" is a word indeed, almost more so than what I consider to be the revolting "orientated". In fact, the example of "orientated" even uses "oriented" instead. Ha ha! 1-0 to me, Fat Mike + Hezza (and thanks for a super evening of FT and TF yesterday, btw).

I thought that Selfridges was supposed to be a respectable department store for us plebs. A cut above the John Lewises, themselves a cut above the Debenhams and such crap. Of course, I've not been in the country a long time so I don't know what the current hierarchy is, but there always was one when I was growing up and I assume there still is one.

Well, Selfridges suck. A few weeks back I bought the following:

• One Nike shirt for the gym.


• One yoga exercise ball.


• One stupid bar thing for pull-ups.


• One pump for the yoga ball.

The yoga ball is huuuuuge. Much bigger than the one on display. But that's ultimately my fault for not spending the 2 minutes it takes to find the fucking measurement on the side of the box (in subsequent tests involving both myself and store staff at numerous stores and covering various makes and models of exercise ball, it has been conclusively proven that 2 minutes is the shortest average time it can take to find the size of the ball on the box - the best time ever being 1:52.34 seconds).

The stupid bar thing is entirely my fault (genuinely, this time) because I didn't realise you actually had to screw it in. I'm always mindlessly optimistic about these bloody bars and always hope to find one that wedges itself into a doorframe. Of course, for it to exert enough pressure to hold up my lumbering frame it would most likely crush any wooden doorframe noticeably and I'm a complete moron for even falling for the old gag again.

The shirt has been fantastic.

The pump proved entirely useless. They told me that they were out of yoga-ball pumps, but that any football pump would do and I could pop back over to the Nike section just behind them and see if they had one. Indeed they did, and happy with my selections I paid for them all and made my way out. It was only when I got home that I realised that they had been lying to me at the yoga ball counter. Fucking hippies.

I blew it up by mouth and nearly had a stroke. In the end, the kindly Dr. R. lent me the pump that came with a far more sensibly sized ball he had bought his GF for Christmas, and that turned the ball from a wobbly orally-inflated doughnut-shaped deathtrap to a somewhat more manageable nearly-rigid sphere. It's still huge though, and I still need a smaller one.

Then, as if Selfridges shoddy staffing ("selling the Selfridges way"! Ha!) to that point hadn't been enough, I stopped on the way out to buy some sun-glasses (in green, not the black shown). Those fat chav morons behind the till had put the sticky price-tag on the soft front part of the arm, which when removed stripped the colouring from the arm with it. But like my mum says, you can't see it from an aeroplane. Then again, nor can you see that my shoes have leather soles and are Italian, but she insists that they must be (though for a year now I've duped her with a pair of Next's finest)... I should there and then have engaged in firm contact between said shoes and aforementioned chav derrières followed immediately by a rapid succession of applications of leather soles to Selfridges floor in the general direction of the exit, but of course I merely paid for the glasses and left calmly only to be accosted by angry bunnyhuggers on the way out demanding that I take back my never-been-near-an-animal purchases because Selfridges burn baby rabbits in their basements for fun, or something. It was something about rabbits. Or cats. I don't recall.

It's just exasperating that apparently nothing can be done in any way properly these days. It makes me feel old, grumpy, decrepit and out of touch. Then again, that's something I suppose I've striven for over a long period so I shouldn't really be complaining. Oh, the sense of entitlement I feel after 8.5 years in the US and a privileged childhood in a tweed suit!

Well, it should be part of it, shouldn't it? No subscription or nuffink. For as long as your OS license is valid, you should have integrated antivirus and spyware software. Of course, the European Wossnames will rule that you'll have to be able to disable it and allow Best Buy to brand your computer with Norton or something like that, but don't even think of charging for it, Mr. Microsoft.

Turns out that I do work with pricks as well. Listening to Dani talk over the years, it's become apparent that working in fashion and design involves encountering vast herds of powertripping socially disfunctional trogolodytes (many of them fat bitchy failed drag-queens). I've seldom noticed this trait in my profession, or have I merely forgotten my encounters because I've been so very sheltered for a little while? I'll have to think about that one.

Anyway, these are the kinds of people who have no direct line of command over you, yet because they've forgotten to do a very important part of their job and people are now asking questions, come swanning into your area of the office and start demanding things that are not your responsibility and would frankly be waaaaaay down on your priority list if they were, quite regardless of what you might be doing (I happened to be in a technical conversation with one of my colleagues).

In this case, the answer really only took 3 minutes to figure out for them so I told them they could have it if they'd please leave and then I made sure I spent a good 90 minutes pressing Send.

The problem is that although there are 4 people in our company that know the component that I'm supporting, one of them is not in support (the one they should have gone to in the first place, but he's working from home and had already told them that he would get to it when he could, since he is also snowed under with more important work), one of them was having the technical conversation with me, and the other is on training in California. Actually, they wanted answers about how to configure their system to point to ours, which I patently don't even know. Then again, everything gets pinned on our system including yesterday, of all things, a broken network cable. Thank fuck I'm paid by the hour.

But the real problem is that I've never come across such a pair of cunts in my life as the two that came in and insisted that we give them answers, shouting (yes, shouting) bullshit about how this must have been documented in the past (quite right, mate, but guess who's responsibility that is - yours) and how many people have done this before (good - go and ask them), demanding something of me and then not even having the courtesy to look at me or even listen to my reply. After 3 attempts to communicate with them, I just turned away, shook my head, muttered "unbelievable" a few times loudly enough for them to hear and got on with what I was doing. For some reason this seemed to placate them! I'll never understand such dipshits. I passed one of the two rags in the corridor a couple of times later that day. He made a point of taking up the whole corridor and making me step out of his way, whilst not making any form of eye-contact whatsoever. He was described by one of my colleagues as a nob-jockey, which is pretty much perfect.

This has definitely got my goat. I've spent the whole night dreaming up ways to wreak revenge, but nothing remotely legal comes to mind.

The one good thing to come out of it all was that the colleague with whom I was conversing when they walked in learnt from me the very useful and easy phrase "fuck-knuckle".

But I've drifted from the point. Actually, the point was only mentioned in passing in the headline. And here it is: I've been asked of late quite a few times (since I'm working with people I've never worked with before) how old I am. As usual, since I can't be arsed, I ask them to guess. Typically, they put me some 3-6 years younger than I am, which I'm secretly quite pleased with (though of course it's no secret any more, the internet being what it is - a haven for porn-hungry gossips).

This perhaps relates to the way the aforementioned pricks of yesterday behaved to me: do they think that I'm much younger than they are? Does this in turn implicitly place them in a superior position to me in their mental corporate hierarchy (amusingly, despite being a contractor, I fit into a role way above their corporate level, but I don't think they'd know that)? There's also the question of whether they think Production Support are all a bunch of no-talent monkeys compared to development, which just isn't true at all (and everyone else seems to treat us with a great deal of respect and interacts with us as if we're human, it must just be those two).

So now, do I try to continue to look younger than I am, though I'll have to change focus now on going to the gym and keeping trim every day rather than maintaining the fabulous hair, darling, and the not shaving too often (coz I hate it, I have to add, if you inspect the facial hair you'll realise it's not tended in the least and really looks rather crap), or do I let myself go, dye my hair grey and wear a shit suit in the hope that it will imbue me with gravitas apparently currently lacking.

Oh, and my phone's still shit.