The Boiled Egg of Infinity

Without wanting to sound too much like a cut-price, Tesco own-brand Larry David*, I am very bad at the goodbye section of a phone call. I just can’t seem to get the timing right for toffee, and the more I think about it the more I come to realise that it’s actually a very delicate balancing act. One I am monumentally bad at.

Depending on how it goes during a phone call, I usually end up at one of the following two scenarios:

Scenario 1: outstayed my welcome

This is when I ramble on, missing the cues from the other person that they want to end the call. As I ramble they go from sending polite signals of “I really should be going now” down the line until they descend, drooling and raving, into the realm of “I will crack my own teeth with a toffee hammer and shit myself in public if it means you will hang up.”

There then follows an awkward series of “umms” and “ahhs” as the sensibe part of my brain tries to grab the controls and point the conversation in the direction of the exit, and the phone handset in the direction of the cradle. Scenario 1 is most often encountered when I am using a desk phone.

Scenario 2: you’ll have had your tea then

And then we have the other extreme, where I end the call quickly and then think of about five things I meant to talk about with the person. Is usually followed by a sheepish phone call that falls under scenario 1, or repeats scenario 2 until I implode with embarassment and just email the person instead.

Quite often I end a call with “That’s great, cheers now!” but sometimes it just seems to get out of sequence and pop up in what should be the middle of the call. Scenario 2 tends to rear its head when I am using my mobile. I think that this is because the terrifyingly short time it takes to heat up against my ear causes all sorts of scary thoughts about dangerous radiation to go through my head**.

Very, very rarely do I get it exactly right, and end up at the right point in the phone call in the right order, at the same time as the other person. Well, when I say “very rarely” I mean “never”, of course. I don’t consider myself to be that socially awkward, I’m usually good enough at picking up on conversational cues (if anything, in person I tend to be reserved) but put me on the end of a phone and I’m suddenly helpless, cast rudderless on a sea of conversational turmoil with waves of potential embarassment crashing across my fo’csle***. I’m not an idiot, really. Pity me. Just don’t phone me to say so.

* I say this because I am sure there is an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” that deals with the offense Larry causes by not knowing how to end a phone call properly. Can’t remember the name of it and I would phone my wife to ask, but you know how that goes for me.

** Funnily enough, much like radiation actually would go through my head.

*** Sounds more painful than it is, don’t worry.

Me and my wife have certain clearly defined areas of responsibility. As she is a passionate and committed maths-phobe, I handle bills and stuff that involves any number crunching. As I am a fat, lazy, work-shy bastard with about as much creativity as a paperclip, she gets to plan and look after the garden. Right now it’s just grass but she wants to make it something nicer. I’ll do the heavy lifting and dig as required, but as in so many areas of our lives, she’s the brains of the operation.

So with that in mind, when my missus asked to go to a garden centre at the weekend I happily obliged (driving? that’s under my name on the list too) and off we went. Inspiration was sought, ideas were had and we even managed to grab a cream cake too (otherwise I would end up a skinny, lazy, work-shy bastard, which just wouldn’t be right). We were just about to leave when we spotted this beauty for sale:

And just in case you want to, you can click on the image above to see a larger version. You know, just to really get the whole feel of the thing. So we had a bit of a laugh, wondered who would buy such a thing, took a picture to show friends and post online and prepared to be on our way. It was all going well, right up to the point where a woman from the garden centre staff walked past us, picked it up, looked past us and said “Right sir, I’ll just leave it at the cash desk for you.” to the man who had been standing right behind us the whole time.

OK, so we got our comeuppance for maybe being a bit snobby and had to make a bit of a sharp exit, with appropriately reddened cheeks*. That said, what sort of garden theme does that guy have in mind? “Well Phoebe, I know you just wanted somewhere nice to relax, but I thought it would be nicer to blend pastoral with the terror of the zombie apocalypse.” Or perhaps, “Oh that, Vicar? Quite a piece, isn’t it? Makes you think about that whole rapture thing, what what?”. I think the thought process runs a bit like this:

We didn’t get a chance to see if there was a switch that made the eyes light up like the Hood from Thunderbirds, but if something like that hasn’t been included then it’s a missed opportunity. Maybe some speakers to allow the keen gardener / weaver of nightmares for a generation of children on the street to record their own moans of the undead? A hose in the mouth to spray viscous green fluid, Exorcist-style, over any cat or dog trying to piss on the herbaceous border? You know, now I think about it, it has possibilities. I wonder if I can get the missus to swap and develop a new appreciation for numbers…

* Make of that what you will. I do not judge. Well, except if you buy a fucking zombie for your garden, obviously.

Right, how many modern TV shows adhere to the format below? How much of the output from how many stations starts at step 1 before plodding the weary, well-trodden path to the end? And how many of us, just looking to relax after a hard day at work, are caught in the gradient of inevitability that surrounds such televisual masterpieces? Ten points and shiny prize* if you can identify some yourself.

So, how many did you get? With some slight variations in format, I can pick up the following just off the top of my head:

Parenting: Supernanny

Makeup / dressing: Snog, Marry, Avoid

Cleaning: How Clean Is Your House?

Cooking: Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares

Work: The Business Inspector

Hotel: The Hotel Inspector

Surviving: Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum

It’s late, I’m tired and am about to go to bed, but those just flew off the top of my head. I’m a massive Star Trek fan so am no stranger to formulaic TV that elevates “variations on a theme” to an artform (Enterprise visits planet, encounters threat, Kirk kicks the crap out of alien man / pumps** alien woman, Enterprise flies off with bridge crew enjoying hearty laugh) but this assembly-line TV is just insulting. And boring. Boring boring boring boring boring***.

* Prize may not be shiny. Terms and conditions apply once I make them up.

** Yes, pumps. I could have said “shags” or something else, but I went for pumps. Blame Irvine Welsh, my recent re-reading of “Glue” and “Porno” has obviously warped my innocent mind.

*** Boring. Booooooring. And I don’t mean entertainingly boring, like Last Of The Summer Wine for the last billion series. I mean Nick Clegg boring.

So here’s a funny thing – just at the end of last year, I wrote about how I managed to completely mess up a WordPress installation and lose my blog’s database, posts, comments, the whole shebang. I quickly rebuilt what I could but the damage was done. In that post (you can, if you’re interested, see it here) I whimsically used an image of an angry Malcolm Tucker for two reasons: to illustrate my mood (not good) and because it actually mirrored the expression I had on my face when everything went so terribly, badly wrong.

Since that fateful day all the comments I have received here at the Boiled Egg Of Infinity have all been spam and all but one have been directed at that single post. Now, assuming that spammers haven’t all been charmed en masse by my writing skills, what could explain the attraction? Seriously, all the spam for my blog has been going to that one, single post. I have come to the conclusion that the spammers have all been attracted by the image of Malcolm Tucker who, as we all know but I’m going to say it anyway because it’s my blog and my rules, is played to perfection by Peter Capaldi. Or, to give him his full title, Peter Capaldi, Lord of Spam.

Now, to follow that bombshell in a logical and sensible manner, there are a number of possibilities to explain this link, all of which have worrying implications for us all:

1. That Peter Capaldi has achieved this level of devotion because he is responsible for sending all of those emails that plague us so much (“Please help, I am the unwanted stepchild of the King of All Oil and Gold and want to smuggle money out of the country using a total stranger’s bank account.”).
2. That Peter Capaldi’s spammer legions owe him fealty because he spends all of his money from the BBC on phishing scams, thus making him their “go-to” guy on the internet. Did his wages from the excellent 3rd series of “The Thick Of It” get wasted on paying expenses for having won the Internet Lottery?
3. That Peter Capaldi has in fact managed to upload his consciousness to the internet and has become a transcendent data-based lifeform, existing only as a pattern of energy moving from network to network, and the imprint of his thought patterns on the ever-flowing stream of digital information has inadvertantly brought about this Capaldi-Spammers connection.

Now I’m just one guy, no expert and have never once met Peter Capaldi (who seems like a lovely man / physical-avatar-of-a-next-evolutionary-level-distributed-artificial-intelligence) but accepting the terms of my argument one of those possibilities has to be true. That’s just logic, that is*.

* Please note this is not logic. Terms and conditions apply.

Okay, just had a frightening moment watching the 10 ‘o clock news on BBC 1. There’s Huw Edwards, introducing a piece on whether the Conservatives understand the British public* and if they can win the coming General Election**. He says something along the lines of “To win, the Conservatives will need to win in seats that the Labour Party have held since…” *noticeable pause, look at monitor* “…1997.”

Proud moment there, Huw old boy, proud moment. Yes, 1997. Not like you had a chance to rehearse that or anything.

* They don’t.

** Worryingly, they could. Get your fucking finger out, Brown.

Right at the back of my local Tesco, up the moving walkway that does that scary locking thing with the wheels on the trolleys, sits a large bank of televisions that just happen to annoy the hell out of me whenever I happen to go there. Before I go on I know that the most obvious solution to this particular conundrum is just to ignore them and not go to that particular section of the store, but they’re right next to the section that sells DVDs and video games. I am, for those of you who either might not know or have forgotten, a huge couch potato and geek that is easily annoyed at stupidly minor things. So it’s a perfect storm, really, and not one of my making.

What is it that annoys me so much? Well, it’s the whole setup that Tesco have trying to sell the HD experience. They have all these TVs with a split-screen, showing what a movie or show looks like in HD and what Tesco want you to think it looks like on a normal TV. It looks something like this *:

Above: see, you need to buy HD! Look at that old shite your TV puts out! Buy HD now! DON’T THINK ABOUT IT! DO IT NOW! **

Except of course that it doesn’t look like that at all, does it? *** I’ve got a normal TV, and it doesn’t look like someone smeared Vaseline all over the screen after punching me in both eyes and stealing my specs. HD TV might well be the best thing ever, but every time I see those televisions in Tesco I always get annoyed at the underhanded way they seem to be selling the experience. They even did it once with Iron Man, and when that white line passed over him Robert Downey Jr. became Robert Indistinct Blob Jr. I’ve got no problem with them selling something, but they should at least try to do it honestly. And yes, I know that sounds daft but I thought I might as well start 2010 as I mean to go on.

* That is, by the way, an image from one of the films that they actually use in Tesco. I had to go and do research to find out what film this was, and get a screenshot. I put in the effort for this, I really do. I don’t even like Keira Knightley all that much.

** Sponsored by Tesco. Every little helps.

*** Of course the possibility always exists that I just happen to have a very specific type of stroke that affects the vision in one eye whenever I happen to step into Tesco. Mind you, I would need to recover from this episode every time I leave the shop but I suppose it’s not impossible. ****

**** Yeah, I suppose it is. Sorry.

Right, here are some things I learned today:

1. When you’re upgrading a WordPress installation and it tells you time and time again to make a backup of your database, it really really means it.
2. If you’re nervous because you never upgraded a WordPress installation before and you think you have backed up the database, do make sure that you actually have backed it up before you do anything that involves deleting and replacing stuff.
3. No, seriously, make sure. Make really sure. Go and check again.

I mention all of this because if, for example, it turns out that you didn’t backup the database after all, have lost everything and need to start from scratch, then you’re left sitting at a laptop feeling like a complete tit with an overwhelming urge to shout obscenties at the reflection staring out at you from the screen.

All of which leaves you with an expression like this:

Above: What do you mean, you deleted the database?

So from me, and my safe pair of hands, I bid you goodnight.

If there is one thing that is guaranteed to put me off going to see a film*, it’s hype. I understand that talking up your latest movie is just a part of the business and I accept that, but when the talk and the praise and the hype all goes OTT it actually starts to put me off the film entirely. I don’t know why I have such a reaction, but there it is. When I think about it, I still haven’t seen Moulin Rouge because so many people I know said “You MUST go and see Moulin Rouge!” when it came out**.

That’s where I am with Avatar, the latest James Cameron film. Between people I know talking about it, mentions on Twitter and various reviews I have seen the words “revolutionary”, “awesome”, “spectacular”, “fantastic” and “gamechanger” tossed around like so many tossed salad leaves at a tosser’s convention. I’ve even seen one celebrity be a bit of a prick about it on Twitter when someone dared to even question the greatness of the film in the smallest degree. As the hype continues to build up I can’t help but think if this film were a person, he or she would be glowing white and floating six inches off the ground as lepers and cripples begged to be touched and cured.

Please don’t get me wrong: I’m actually quite keen to go and see the film, because I’m a geeky fan of all things science fiction and it looks like a passable enough way to pass an hour or so. But – and I say this with all due respect and in as mild a way as I possibly can – IT’S JUST A FUCKING FILM. Now, you want to talk about revolutionary ideas and “gamechangers” that’s fine. Democracy? Gamechanger. Polio vaccine? Gamechanger. Telephone? Gamechanger. Those scientists who mapped out the entire genetic code of cancer? Gamechanger. CGI-stuffed story with blue aliens, spaceships and action sequences that will be out on DVD and Blu-Ray within the year? THAT WOULD BE A FILM.

* And if you want to put me off reading a book, make a film of it and then print a copy of the book that uses the movie poster (or a scene from the movie) as the cover image. What, we won’t buy a book unless it has someone famous on the cover? What is this, the Heat magazine approach to literature? I saw a copy of “A Christmas Carol” in Tesco last week and in addition to the movie poster being the cover, there was text all along the top that said “Now a major motion picture”. You know, because being a classic bit of literature wasn’t enough.

Above: If only Dickens had thought of blue aliens first.

** Is this cutting off my nose to spite my face? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I just don’t like the glassy-eyed zeal that gets into people’s eyes when they are absolutely convinced that you would love something and that you should go and see it right away. I like apples and salt and vinegar crisps, but I don’t go all shiny-eyed cult leader on people and try to convert them to Granny Smith’s Golden Wonder Church of Walkers. Plus, Nicole Kidman pisses me off. An entire video singing with Robbie Williams and she doesn’t slap him silly once. Wasted opportunity.

When I read this Shortpacked! strip today I couldn’t help but have a look at the site that it mentioned, Stand for Christmas. I thought the cartoonist was just making it up, or if the site existed he was perhaps exaggerating for the sake of the joke. I was wrong, and obviously underestimated the capacity some people have to generate outrage where no outrage has any reason to exist. What I love most of all is the fact that some of the people using the site are so angry that the spirit of Christmas* has not made it into their shopping experience that they get angry and feel the need to ditch any semblance of basic manners or decency in their rush to get on their computer and bitch relentlessly about a shop not playing the proper music or an underpaid checkout person not throwing in a “Hallelujah!” with every receipt.

Some of my favourite comments on the site are: “Too liberal! I’ll order online.” (that one was talking about Borders) and “I visited Babies R Us today. No mention was made of Christmas when checking out.” (that would be Toys R Us, but in all fairness their giraffe overlord might not celebrate Christmas). If you have five minutes and want to see what happens when a group of people who could give Daily Mail readers a run for their money get all stirred up and angry, go have a look. It all goes to prove a point that I would like to make by means of a diagram**:

* I’m reliably informed this is stuff like love, kindness, compassion, understanding and what could be termed an overall sense of good fellowship. If my wife is reading this, it also involves BUYING YOUR HUSBAND MANY MANY COOL PRESENTS. And making him a sandwich when he’s sitting reading.

** The sad thing is, I am actually quite proud of the diagram even though it was just a matter of five minutes in Fireworks. That’s effort, that is, effort that you don’t often see in this day and age.

At the end of the year the internet, papers and TV schedules are always jam-packed with retrospective stuff. Who died this year, what happened this year, I loved 2009, all that sort of stuff. Some of it is good and some of it is bad, but it fills column inches/airtime and I suppose it allows Paul Ross to earn enough to eat for the next 12 months. With that in mind, I decided to get in on the action early and write about the things I had planned to do this year and didn’t. I may or may not offer excuses as I go along.

1) Learn to play piano

For my 30th my friends all clubbed together and bought me a USB keyboard I could use with my Mac. I’ve always fancied learning how to play the piano and so bought myself a book and DVD to start me on my way. The DVD featured a stern Australian woman who promised to have me playing the piano in no time (and believe me, she was stern, I was not about to argue with her). Of course, life being life things got in the way, things got busy, the keyboard was put to one side and hasn’t been picked up since. Trapped on the shiny DVD disk, I think the stern Australian woman is probably screaming like an angry Genie by now.

2) Lose weight

This was all part of a big plan for 2009. I want (and need) to lose weight. Couple that with my being a big SF fan and generally geeky person, you can understand why I planned that if I lost enough weight, I would dress up as the 10th Doctor for Halloween. Motivation for saddoes is a difficult thing to understand, but believe me this was the plan I set. Because, you see, when you’re my size and you wear a battered old pinstripe suit then the overall look is less this…

And more this…

So given that I achieved just about 0% weight loss, you can see where that plan went. If I had pushed ahead regardless, I remain convinced that the overall effect would have been less “Last of the Time Lords” and more “Ullo John, got a new TARDIS?”

3) Start running

This is related to point 2. I had grand plans to get up early every morning and start the day with a run. Well, I say a run – at first it would be a moderately fast lumber, then I hoped to graduate up to a run as time went by. Plan derailed because a) I am lazy and b) Scotland is COLD in the mornings.

4) Read “The Republic”

I bought “The Republic” a while back and it’s a book I keep picking up now and again to have a go at it. I like to read – in fact, it’s one of my favourite things to do and probably contributed towards my failure in point 2 – but this one is a tough read…and to think I used to laugh at one of the guys at work, who has tried and failed several times to make it through Joyce’s “Ulysses”. I’ll keep at it, but at the start of this year it was on my list of books to have read by the end of the year.

5) Get better at DIY

I included this in my plans at the start of the year because I am terrible at anything remotely practical *. My wife is the go-to person in our house for DIY, changing plugs and all that sort of thing. At the time of writing I am still likely to electrocute/stab/impale/burn myself when doing anything that involves tools. I did manage (with my wife’s help) to put up curtain rails when we first moved in, but that wasn’t without some tension on my part beforehand and a hot cup of tea afterwards.

6) Write more

2009 was going to be the year for me to write more, to be creative and enjoy having a blog. Granted, very few people would read it (I’m pretty sure the wife only does so occasionally because of that hypnosis tape I play when she sleeps her love for me) but that wasn’t the point, the point was to get in touch with my creativity more and see what I could produce when I put my mind to it. I’m afraid to count the number of posts I actually made this year, but I think it’s pretty small.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all bad by any means – there is plenty I have managed to do this year and I am lucky in that I have time to have another crack at the ones in the list above. There is just something about this time of year that makes me think about what I had planned to do and didn’t make the time for. Someone should make a television show about that…hold on, I have to go, Paul Ross just turned up at my door and is worrying the neighbours.

* Oddly enough, I am very good with flat-packed furniture. Seriously, you want a bookcase from IKEA building, I am your man.