Oh So Tedious

People with poor punctuality are the worst type of people in the world, if there was a chart showing the various rungs of human society then the unpunctual would surely be right at the bottom with Nazi’s and elderly drivers. Having someone turning up late to an engagement is like them turning up and delivering a right hook, then kicking you in the stomach and stealing your money, it is unnecessary and tells you that they have better things to do than meet with you.
So to be unpunctual you obviously respect no-one and have the IQ of a hamster, but if you are simply unorganised and a bit dull then I am here to offer you redemption from you satirical acts.
To be punctual you simply must have a decent grasp on your life, waking up at least half an hour before arranging to meet and leaving plenty of time for travel. Alarm clocks are a brilliant aid for this and I’d also recommend not arranging other activities that might delay your meeting, and finally, rather than just not bothering to turn up, how about telling them the day before and telling the truth like, “I can’t be bothered”, “My sleep is more important than seeing you” or “If I am forced to see you again I might just kill myself”.
That is how easy it is to be on time, hopefully that puts the point across.

You go home one day and you find a note on the table, your girlfriends gone out partying and won’t be back for several days, you’re family’s on holiday in New Zealand and the dog’s run off with the dog next door, you ring up your mates to go bowling but they’re all busy watching a show about flying squirrels. You’re home alone, with nothing to do and you must survive the evening, but don’t panic, I’m here to talk you through the essential survival tactics.
First thing to do is to lock all the doors and close all the windows and curtains, no-one should know that you are at home, this will prevent all visitors and warn away potential predators, you may also put claymores by the doors so long as you remember to remove them the next day and before your darling other half returns home. Once ground zero is secured and on lock-down, you must check all supplies, just remember that your body can survive for up to 3 weeks without food but without water you will be dead in 3 days, but seeing as you don’t want to be uncomfortable move the fridge into a close proximity of the sofa and surround yourself with a vast array of snacks (crisps and popcorn recommended).
You have sustenance and security, now you need comfort and entertainment. Socks are usually essential along with underwear and shirt, everything else is optional. Select a chair with some sort of footrest to sit in, failing that pull a table near or lay the recently moved fridge onto its side, this chair must be within a viewing angle of 20 degrees from the front centre of the TV for optimum enjoyability.
When it comes to the visual entertainment you have 4 choices, you can either watch live sport, a sci-fi TV show/ film, an all American explosion filled action film or some sort of comedy (Family Guy is highly recommended). These are the only options that you have for watching, anything else is considered to be blasphemous and God will set fire to you when you sleep, you must also be careful for there are several options that you can under no means view in each of those categories. Darts is not a sport so can’t be watched, and all water sports are considered to be unsuitable for viewing unless the said event is the Oxford-Cambridge boat race or the Olympic rowing races which Britain have to be involved in.
The action film does not have to show America as the victors, it just needs to have plenty of Hollywood style explosions and violence, in fact pleasure is multiplied if America loses horribly.
For sci-fi anything is accepted due to it’s masculine affiliated audience.
Comedy is tricky, Rom-coms are off limits, if you are male and are watching one, Rambo will burst through your window and remove your testicles, no questions asked. You must not watch the Mighty Boosh either because it is not a comedy, just a cult and therefore does not fall in the comedy, stand up comedy is loosely permitted on the grounds that it must be funny ( if it does not meet this criteria then it must be destroyed before the half hour mark), classics such as Steptoe and son aren’t usually used in such a situation but aren’t forbidden either but to be on the safe side you should stick to shows such as Family Guy, American Dad and Futurama.
You are now set for the night, you now should only have to move to visit the toilet and re-stock the maelstrom of food around you during the adverts.
Remember what I have told you and everything will be fine until someone returns to remove the weight of responsibility from your shoulders.

In a week of apparent apocolypse I’m trying to lighten the mood with a more poetic approach to bloggery. Not being a poet I expect this to be as a Lewis Hamilton emergency brake, but here go’s.

Fuel pumps, fuel pumps bleeding dry,
“get us more fuel” the people cry!
The queues are longer than the Mighty Boosh,
and are equally likely to get you hanging from a noose.
While filling up your car is a step too far,
So set up the barby and put on a char……
grilled burger whilst the weather is nice,
hurry though before the arrival of the snow and the ice.
Whilst on the weather,
what little is better,
than going to the beach or sniffing the heather.
Walking in the hills is heavens abode,
but your exploits will be blighted by the countryside code.
Oh how the labour party ruins your life,
and are they really worth the trouble and strife?
The economy in meltdown,
and the football’s a let down.
And how about Holland, what a goal by Dirk Kuyt.
American law, means that we saw,
An Evil man being dropped to the floor,
Beating his kid at the side of the road,
what sort of hope does this behavior bode?
In Britian the news,
could put us in stews,
Hyper- Inflation??
Will worry the nation,
Or is it a myth,
After all the stock market is like a big Hieroglyph.
As my time draws to an end,
I ponder the hate mail, you surely will send.
Bring back Keates, Dickens and the rest,
This poet has definitely failed the test.

How on Earth did Byron do this for a living?

Welcome to a new feature that I am doing for the benefit of you the readers, in which I give you sensible advice that you can use in normal, everyday situations. Enjoy.

This is a task that the human brain somehow finds incomprehensible, but a simple rule with all technology that I use is that it can’t be broken. Now obviously taking a screwdriver to it would do considerable damage as would trying to turn things on using a sledgehammer, but using the provided implements such as remotes and/ or buttons on the front of the machine you are simply incapable of doing any permanent damage.
Firstly you need to start off looking on the on- screen menu for a section saying “Date/ Time” or “Clock”, after discovering this you need to find out what the current time is and then set it into the VCR. (Warning: this menu is somewhat elusive and only appears if you really believe it’s there.) If you are forced to set the time through the front of the video, then besides being doomed you are on your own, I suggest attempting to translate the guide that accompanied, or failing that, pressing the time/ clock button, or in the absence of that holding the play button when no video is inserted and setting the time using the rewind/ fast forward buttons.
If none of these apply and you’re sure you aren’t trying to set your toaster, then i’m afraid to say that you should break out the sledgehammer and try to get a replacement through your warranty.

Posted by Rob

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This can’t be, Britain officially is the most anti- social country in Europe, followed closely by the anarchic Frog’s, but how can the country that once had an empire that the sun never set upon become so messed up? Immigrant’s? no. Alcohol? possily. Poor parenting? more than likely. But above all of these and with the exception of everything being made illegal by a useless nannying government, a TV show that actually makes me want to do some work. One that would make suicide a viable option to watching. Launching the career’s of so called “celebrities” such as Jade “the spade” Goody and “bottoms up” Kinga, It could be nothing other than Big Brother, a show watched by people who have nothing else to live for and are just finding ways to pass the time until they die.

The original idea was a fairly innovative one, put alot of varying and contrasting people into a confined space for a long length of time and see whether they killed each other, the winner gets eternal fame and a big fat pay check, but here we are after another 8 series and it has snowballed out of control with several spin off shows and the entire C4 schedule at it’s whim.
Before I begin C+E4 are my favourite channels with the exception of relocation, relocation, relocation and of course Big Brother, Big Brother live, Big Brothers little brother, an Audience with Big Brother, Big Brother +1, Big Brothers little brother +1, Big Brother live +1 and the rest of it’s ridiculous amount of coverage.
This use of Big Brother now seems purely to be a time filler for the C4 bosses to go on a holiday and leave their understudies in charge with very little risk of messing up such a repetitive show.
So far as I can see, the only thing that changes is the day that is announced at the start, “Day 5 in the house and Cherise is flirting with everything with legs, including the table.”, “Day 2786 and Marco’s finished off the remaining contestants and made a chair from there insides.” But obviously the challenges aren’t as exciting as hunting and making furniture from the other contestants because the think tanks at C4 are away and left Norbert in charge who has to think of a challenge that he can do for 20p, so shoves them into a box for a week, fun.
As for the contestants though, the arrival of Jade Goody sparked a transcendence for the show, her stupidity made the search for the next contestant change completely, a maximum IQ score of about 5 was imposed and the contestants all had to be picked from the deepest depths of society where no one else would dare wander, they must also now have lots of prejudices against all the other house mates with which C4 can grab all the headlines, for example a racist dolt with a Bollywood superstar.
A better idea would be to put 20 jews in a room with a member of the B.N.P and make them play a game of monopoly. The jews would wipe the floor with the B.N.P member and who would blame society and who would go mental.
Going back to my original point, TV is the realm of idols that young people look up to, so seeing a bunch of people who can barely string 2 words together is going to give them a chance in life that is equal to removing their limbs at birth.
I have an alternative to watching Big brother, It’s called a life.

I should perhaps mention before I start this post that we at Oh So Tedious are now being sponsored by Willoughby’s Wicked White Paint. I’m going to stress, though, that our integrity hasn’t been damaged by this, and that the blog won’t just turn into a subtle advertising campaign :)

To kick in 2008, His Holiness the Pope decided to wage war with Satan. It’s a fact. “They have introduced courses for priests to combat what they call the most extreme form of “Godlessness.” So, essentially, some crazy exorcist guy is going to go round killing (sorry, removing the demons from) atheists.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t hate the Church. It’s just that some of things they do are crazy.

With that article came a picture of the Pope with the caption, “Satanism on the rise…”. Now that explains something.

Of course, all sorts of comments could be made about that hand gesture, and the fact that His Holiness was a member of the Nazi Youth, but that would be wrong. Besides, as a child he’d have had little choice but to join; Germany had “elected” Hitler and he was there to stay. I’m not a Nazi (of course) but, personally, I blame the Jews for over-running the banking system, in the first place*. Hitler was even quite popular with the Allies at one point, who thought his tough stance on immigration was wunderbar; the Nazis were setting Europe on fire.

That was a joke, by the way. Cause the Nazis really were setting Europe… Oh, never mind. We’ll just gloss over that bit [with some Willoughby's Sensational Stain Remover].

I heard someone justify the fact that Jesus was “born of a virgin” the other day, by saying, “well she told an angel she was a virgin, and angels aren’t the kind of people you lie to”. What?! Somebody also asked me, “How can you not believe in God?” What a stupid question!

Another man recently found Jesus in a piece of granite:

Surely I’m not the only one who see’s, not Jesus but, erm, well, Satan?! And if not Satan … just a piece of granite! Using some Willoughby’s Wicked White Paint made it a lot clearer:

But absolute faith in something can be a bad thing. I’ve just read an article about Mike Huckabee, a US presidential candidate, and “he is insane, and wants to turn this country [America] into a theocracy the likes of which hasn’t been seen since, well, the Taliban…” A bit too critical. Read this from Huckabee himself:

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

Voting for McCain is essentially casting out your freedoms forever.

Here endeth the lesson.

Ciao.

*Joke! God.

Chris is the guy behind “The Book Swede and His Blog”, a sci-fi book review website. I demand that you read it now, even if you don’t like the genre. I’m beginning to convert already… agh no!

In the last few weeks my hatred of maths has come up in an article, and it is still growing. You may also have noticed my annoyance towards a certain political party. Well the two of them have met with one of the other things that I most hate, The Headmistress.
In my eyes the headmistress should be someone who is there to deal out punishment and keep the machine that is school running smoothly and oiling the cogs if something goes wrong, ours though seems to have taken the idea of of an unleaded machine and tried to run it on diesel to make herself look eco- politically friendly. The people who hear about the school but are lucky enough to not go there think that everything is going great and this is Devon’s answer to Oxford, the machine (staff and students) can’t run on the fuel that was not meant for them so begin to implode and slowly but surely come to a horrible and inevitable stop, but of course no one knows or cares.
Now you may think that this is just a student who is tired of school and is just making wild assumptions for the sake of it, so if I were to tell you that I have evidence to prove me right and bring some attention to our plight you may start to feel sorry for this head teacher.
Recently our most “illustrious” government have decided that we need to know how badly our educational infrastructure has been falling apart, so have employed posh people called Ellington Smithe to see if it needs money for being good, or needs to be impoverished as a solution to it’s failure. But apparently they weren’t liked so they have taken to employing number’s to talk to us, this might sound like a really good TV show but I don’t think this is a good move for schools, statistics can be fiddled to make certain people look good depending on who is using them, as an example I take the school that I have already mentioned. It has been placed as the 21st most improved school in the country, which is all good news, apart from the fact that it isn’t, according to the STATISTICS it’s grades have went up by 20% in maths, science and English in the last 4 years, despite behavior being at an all time low. Whilst talking to one of the teacher’s he told me that in his 30 years of teaching this years year 8’s are the worst behaved with absolutely no comparison to any other class, ever. And coincidentally those year 8’s are the ones that have improved by 20%, and that teacher is considering whether he should quit or face severe depression.
So the school obviously hasn’t improved, and being here for 6 years has allowed me to see that it wasn’t that bad before our right wing Nazi-mistress turned up, but now teachers dread teaching and can do absolutely nothing about the students from hell. But even so she wanted a trophy from the council to show off to onlookers and to put even more strain on the already struggling engine.
Our school, It’s a bit like a Toyota Prius being run on the whale blubber and coal.

There is political scandal I say. Misplaced votes, horrible speeches and plenty of people who are well deserving of your hatred. Of course I’m not talking about the bi-elections, but about the Eurovision “song” contest, the one thing that angers me more than the elderly and Tony Blair.
This was the event that launched the career of Cliff Richard and although he does sound like a nice guy and is so laid back that he must be on the coke, I would rather staple my eyelids shut and then try to walk across a motorway than listen to one of his morbidly cheery records. We’re not all going on summer holidays, it’s Britain, we have a diet of fish and chips, rain and disappointment. The sun only shines during Christmas when we are busy trying to decide a fitting punishment for the person who brought you a pair of odd socks.

Sadly though Eurovision has become a brilliant compass for political relations, but the home of awful song writing and singers straight from hell. As I say this I do of course mean the entrants such as Spain, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Poland and Latvia. Where to start?? The Bosnian entry looked like how Captain Jack Sparrow would turn out if he turned to heavy narcotics and binge drinking and sounded similar to his looks. The Polish entrant put me in the mind of an escaped air hostess who had fallen into a tub of teeth whitener and then decided that she wasn’t orange enough for Europe so applied several more layers of fake tan and just to be safe added some fluorescent paint to top it off. Spain, for god’s sake the guy looked like a hellish reincarnation of Elvis and was sent to torture our ears with that stupid little keyboard, and Latvia, I just can’t be bothered to describe it, beating myself to a pulp with my own leg would have been preferable and excited me more. As I have just shown half of the other entrants suck more the a dyson, which leaves me quite bemused when I see that the UK has tied with Germany for the worst song, Germany deserve to be there when you think we haven’t had any good musicians in there since Beethoven some 200 years ago and this attempt featured the wicked witch of the north, south,east and even the west, the sounds that they produced were as pleasurable as a massage from Edward Scissorhands. Poor old Andy Abraham wasn’t so deserving of his abysmal finish, his performance was a breath of fresh air and the upbeat retro styling’s of the song gave me hope for us perhaps winning for the first time in 10 years, but something called “political voting” stopped us and is now giving us the possibility of losing Wogan and perhaps all the BBC funding that goes into the contest. I say good, we don’t get any spectacular music just lots of frustration and having to live through awful songs like the Icelandic techno- sh**e.

A good way to renew Britain’s interest in the contest would be to put me at the helm, I would make all the Eastern block solidate into one super entry, this way they can’t vote for each other and gives the big 4 a better chance of winning. Then because the whole listening to 20 countries sing and then see 43 countries vote is oh so tedious, I would have a panel of judges made up of Jeremy Clarkson, Anne Robinson, Simon Cowell and me, we would then be able to decide how long they sing by a Britain’s got talent style button vote and if we deem them to be suitably awful or they displease us in any way then we would have the option of voting to select a suitable punishment up to and including removal of their vocal chords. After we have compiled a list of 10 we would then put it to the public vote and would then judge the interval act and if they make Girls Aloud look half decent we could set fire to them, make them fight to the death in a dungeon or have them play football with rolled up hedgehogs until they choose the cyanide.
An effective way to liven up and make the Eurovision a fairer, less political place to be.
But if the BBC do for some reason still show it next year without my brilliant changes, I ‘ll watch something less predictable.
Like a fight between an articulated lorry and Smudge the kitten.

So this isn’t as regular as previously said. Who cares anyway? I love to do things on the spur of the moment. This week (haha, week), I’m doing an “essential” list.

Advert

Ok, there isn’t really such thing as an “essential advert”, but I advise you’d watch it…

I’m not thirsty.

Podcast

I was on the train Friday, trying not to pee myself laughing. Perhaps from all that water, or even:

The Fat-Pie Podcast?

Waller FM is the setting for the Fat-Pie podcast. The show is essentially a pastiche of all the rubbish from commercial radio everywhere, brought to you by the same fabulous guys as Burnt Face Man and Salad Fingers. Don’t know what I’m talking about? http://www.fat-pie.com

Magazine

NME is… (gasp) NICER! How did it happen?

After a big re-design, I’ve noticed less of the “let’s jump on the Mighty Boosh and anything that isn’t really music bandwagon” (with all due respect to the Boosh and anything that isn’t music) and more “Let’s review music”.

I even went as far as buying a copy of the magazine. It wasn’t bad, I gotta admit.

Telly Program

There is absolutely NOTHING to watch at the moment. The schedule is full of repeats and rubbish; Friday’s Eurovision was disappointing - Wogan is threatening to leave; Plus there’s lots of football (yawn) - which is moving The Apprentice back a day early.

How dare they?!

Celebrity Nonsense

Sequential Indexing Nightmare (Sorry, database joke) Amy Winehouse is back with her new video… on YouTube… playing with… mice.

EUGH. Did I just cover a celebrity story?!

God, no!

I feel saddened to report to you that I have a cold, not only is this unpleasant but during the midst of exams it is also unwelcome. I can’t concentrate because of a headache and I’m unable to read due to a runny nose, never a help but I have to lumber on being British and all that.
I can plea to the exam board for an extra 2% to be added on to my final score but considering a loss of 10% this does very little for my grades and just prepares my confidence for a far greater fall, sadly the exam that I must prepare for through my ailments is perhaps my best hope of staying off the streets and in my bright red converse.
In a time of great change with Labour struggling to hang onto an increasingly precarious cliff- face, losing the largest population gathering in Britain to the clown of politics (albeit the brightest hope since Ms Thatcher), honestly though I don’t care. Seeing Labour flail is amusing and entertaining but pales in comparison with the task that me and young adults all over the UK face in the coming month I must revise for weeks on end for my A levels, after that prepare for my Grade 5 music theory whilst learning to drive and preparing for my driving theory, and after that spend the remainder of my summer preparing for my Grade7 practical music, after doing coursework for my A levels of course.
So it annoys me greatly to hear that old biddies are complaining because “exams are getting easier”, sorry Clemence but they just aren’t, if you had said that we have a greater idea of what to write about in an exam I would agree, syllabus’ are a godsend and tell you what you should know, knowing it though is not quite as simple as they only give you a rough guideline of what you need to learn. It’s like going into a restaurant knowing that you’re going to eat, but not having the faintest idea of what that might be, you could get a lobster thermidore or you might get cod and chips, so then you look at the menu for an idea of what it might be. This menu is like a syllabus not telling you the ingredients or how to prepare it, but it tells you what the end result should be.
The syllabus therefore does not give very much away to justify poor Ethel’s claims and they most certainly aren’t implying that we are smarter than them (a possibility though), and I’m fairly sure that 50 years ago there wasn’t more information in the world to learn about.
What is making our exams easier them? Teachers spend more time teaching rather than beating the kids, students spend more time beating up each other than learning, how is Edith correct then?
To put it bluntly, she’s not. This is just another case of old people trying to justify themselves in the only way that they feel they can, and seeing as they haven’t sat in any of the exams then their claims have just crashed and burnt in the same way Labour did in the recent elections.

Putting down the elderly and Labour, a better cure than anti-biotic’s.