TOO SOON

(Mon 16th Nov 2009, 13:02, More)

KICK HIM OUT

with apologies to Carl Heinrich Bloch
(Fri 25th Sep 2009, 13:11, More)

(Wed 9th Sep 2009, 20:37, More)

Theft detection app for iPhone

(Wed 17th Jun 2009, 22:28, More)

now with added CFB
(Sat 24th Jan 2009, 15:18, More)

Only if I can stick this here.

cfb
(Wed 7th May 2008, 23:34, More)

Extremely small gladiators!

click for larger
(Tue 29th Apr 2008, 16:07, More)

Hush.

(Tue 12th Feb 2008, 12:53, More)

» Evil Pranks

A message from God
My lab partner at university was a kind soul, with a heart of gold. Unfortunately he was also the most incredibly gullible person on the planet. I shall not mention his name, because it would be unfair.

So anyway, Tanvir came from an extremely insular Pakistani community in Glasgow. Quite how he got into 4th year of a pharmacy degree thinking that babies came out of a woman's anus is surely an indictment of the Scottish education system. [N.B. this is not a lie, his flatmates had to sit him down and explain it to him.]

I am a very patient person, and became the one who had to explain to Tani what was happening all the time. I quickly learned not to use sarcasm. We were doing an experiment with the Karl Fischer apparatus, Tani sidled across to me and indicated the only piece of hardware on the bench.

"Is that the Karl Fiss-cher apparatus, the Karl Fiss-cher apparatus?" he asked me. I replied "No, Tani, the Karl Fischer apparatus is broken so today we'll be using the James Smith apparatus instead". Five minutes later I realised he was going through his notes and crossing out every incidence of the words "Karl Fischer" and replacing them with "James Smith".

That is not the story, though. One night I was venting about his denseness to my flatmates (one lapsed Protestant, one Hindu) and in a flash of incensed inspiration I said "I bet his password on the computers is his name!"

The next day we were using the spreadsheets, and he was sitting beside me. I looked out of the corner of my eye as he typed in his password with one finger.

T - A - N - V - I - R

Feeling pleased with my deduction being proved so accurate, I confided in my flatmates that I was correct about his password. They decided to put a message on his screen. I was not involved in the creation of the message. Honest.

The following week in the computer lab (bear in mind this was 1996, computers didn't grow on trees like they do now) I made sure I was sitting behind where he was. I watched as he typed in his password, and strange text filled the screen. "Huh?" he said, and started reading. The two girls sitting beside him noticed his confusion and started reading as well:

"Hello Tanvir, this is Allah.

I have been watching you, and I am pleased with your progress. Soon you will make your family proud.

Remember to abide by your Muslim principles, and continue to resist the temptations of alcohol and women."

(At this stage, the two girls were giggling, and Tani was chuckling in a puzzled manner. His chuckling stopped abruptly and he slapped his hands over the screen as he read the next sentence.)

"So remember: no drinking, no women, and no jerking off in the toilet when you think I can't see you."

The girls started asking him what it said. He made a high-pitched, strangled noise, and shook his head rapidly. He risked taking one hand off the screen to slap it randomly on the keyboard. The text vanished from the screen, so he took his other hand away. Half a second later, it reappeared and he slapped both his hands on the screen again.

Once the offending text had been removed, the tutor asked Tani if he had told anyone his password. "No!" he barked like a dog, shaking his head again.

I do feel bad about it, but we did all genuinely like him (to an extent) and got him to come out of his shell. We even cast him as a unicorn in the pantomime, after he believed another classmate who told him that scientists had captured a unicorn trotting through Duthie Park in Aberdeen.

I'm still not making any of this up.
(Wed 19th Dec 2007, 0:38, More)

» Conspiracy theory nutters

I was immortalised in a picture by famous political art genius* David Dees (a.k.a. Catnipppp)
after disagreeing with him on some of the finer points of his careful research into vaccines. I put a picture of myself wearing a tinfoil hat on /board to take the piss out of him, though, so fair do's.



I won't link to any of the debates we had on /board, if I actually started reading any of them again I think I'd lose the will to live.

* www.deesillustration.com/bio.html

www.rense.com/1.mpicons/dees1.htm


.
(Thu 27th Aug 2009, 14:26, More)

» When Animals Attack

"I've got a tourist here, he's just been bitten by a dog!"
I was walking back to the hostel in Cairns one fine August afternoon, past the dilapidated old house on the corner of McLeod Street and Charles Street. There were two Rhodesian ridgebacks play-fighting outside.

I like dogs. I've always got on well with them. When I was getting my vaccinations, I was offered the chance to get a rabies shot, and my exact words were "come on, I'm not going to get bitten by a dog".

The dogs noticed me passing a few metres away from them, and abruptly stopped their game. One of them leapt to its feet, emitted one solitary bark, and ran towards me. I was slightly nonplussed as it fastened its jaw around my left shin. I distinctly remember the thought that was going through my head: "I cannot believe I am being bitten by a dog!"

I was more than a little disoriented by this turn of events, especially since the dog had backed off and launched itself for another strike, as his friend watched. So I did something unwise.

I turned around and started to move away at speed. This did obviously disorient the dog, because only one tooth hit the target. The target was my left buttock, and the tooth went straight through my shorts and created an interesting new hole in my arse.

I turned to face the dogs again. By this stage they had started to back off. Luckily for me, a white van pulled off the road and placed himself between me and the animals.

"You all right, mate?" shouted the man in the van as he pulled out a mobile phone.

I replied that I was fine, just a little shaken up. I looked down and saw that the bite on my leg was hardly bleeding, the teeth had broken the skin but not much more. I was about to make a comment about what a wimp the dog was when I realised that the back of my shorts was soaked in blood.

"Can't have our tourists being bitten by dogs," exclaimed the man as he punched a number into his mobile. "Hello, is that animal control? I've got a tourist here, he's just been bitten by a dog!"

So at 7am the next day I gave a statement to the local animal constabulary. The gentleman in the house in question apparently used to have about five dogs, but at least two had been taken away. I was told that they had a huge file on the dog, but this was the first time it had bitten anyone.

I left Cairns on a pre-arranged bus at 8am, and never heard anything about what happened after that. From what I was told, though, I suspect the dogs were taken away for... re-education.

[not-very-impressive photo of leg bite]
(Sun 27th Apr 2008, 13:17, More)

» Celebrities part II

Possible treason?
When I was 10, I was a runner at the rowing course for the 1986 Commonwealth Games (the rowing taking place at Strathclyde Park near Glasgow). My dad was/is involved in international rowing, and I'd been dragged along to regattas since before I could walk, so it was only to be expected that I'd have to help out.

In the blissfully ignorant days before information technology took over the world and turned us all into imbeciles, everything was a little bit more low-tech. The finish tower at Strathclyde Park has four floors. The fourth floor was where the race officials were based, the third floor was where the commentators pontificated from and the second floor was where everything important happened.

When boats passed the finish line and the big hooter sounded, the results clattered through the computer and got printed out. My job was to photocopy the results, and then run out of the finish tower, along the causeway, through the gate (past the bored security guard - a Commonwealth Games innovation, usually nobody watched the gate), along the front of the grandstand, up the steps, along the top of the grandstand and into the BBC shack where I would breathlessly hand the printed set of numbers to one of the BBC folk.

This was years before Sir Steve Redgrave raised rowing's profile in the public eye, so it's probably fair to suggest that at that time the BBC didn't give a flying fuck about the intermediate stage times for the repecharges.

Then I would run back to the finish tower. In my break times, I would swap pin badges with foreigners (I remember the Canadian rowers as being the most generous with their pin badges).

Anyway, getting towards the finals, word came down that HRH Princess Anne would be visiting. The new extra guards that day who checked my accreditation at the gate were awfully serious, not like the usual jokey bloke.

Also, it became apparent that there were too many people crammed into the second floor, sitting around and waiting for the increasingly infrequent races to finish. So to clear some bodies out of the room, two chairs were placed in the tiny windowless corridor between the stairwell and the computer room, and my fellow runner Kevin and I were unceremoniously plonked on them.

Our new job (this being finals day, there were hardly any races taking place) was to sit in the chairs and to stand to attention when HRH Princess Anne entered. This took a while, after a good few false starts of standing up abruptly to realise that it was just some umpire from the top floor wanting to photocopy something.

Eventually, it happened. The door from the stairwell opened, Kevin and I stood up immediately and held position beside our seats, and two black-clad bodyguards swept past us - followed by HRH Princess Anne. And another black-clad bodyguard. And at least two senior Scottish Rowing bodies, anxious to prove their importance in the grand scheme of things by hanging around near a VIP.

As Princess Anne was shown around the second floor ("this computer is where the results come through... we print them out on this printer here... and then we photocopy them here...") Kevin and I realised that everyone in the room had their backs to us.

So we started sticking our fingers up at Princess Anne's back, as she stood approximately four feet away from us, in plain view, surrounded by bodyguards, all with their backs to us. It was at this exact moment that Kevin introduced me to the concept of manipulating one's raised middle finger and changing it to the classic V-sign while chanting - very quietly - "bend it, mend it, double it and send it".

Then Princess Anne left. As she swept out of the room back to the stairwell (presumably to patronise the commentator, who to be frank probably didn't know what year it was) she glanced at us, smiled and said "waiting?" I giggled and said "yes!"

She's shorter than you might think, and she genuinely does look like a horse.
(Fri 9th Oct 2009, 1:16, More)

» I don't understand the attraction

Stewart Lee
So many people keep telling me that he's a genius, I'm prepared to concede that. I've seen nothing that convinces me this is the case but it's simply not worth arguing the point with an army of internet fanboys.

Shame he's so fucking smug and isn't actually funny, though.
(Tue 20th Oct 2009, 8:34, More)