Recently, thanks to a kerfuffle relating to a car being serviced under warranty at a garage that was nowhere near where we live, I needed to get back home from Maidenhead by public transport.
Getting to our house from anywhere by public transport is difficult, but even given our limited options, no effort has ever been made to link our home with Maidenhead. So getting home meant two buses and four trains and would take a minimum of two hours and 40 minutes, and even that journey time was only possible a few times a day.
The last couple of weeks have been both busy and stressful, so I will admit I was not in the optimum frame of mind for a difficult journey, and may have been distracted when a little concentration would help. But even given that excuse I managed to screw this up to a degree I would scarcely have believed possible.
In the last few weeks we have had all manner of visitors to chez McIver to see the newly-hatched Northern Orb. My parents and brother turned up last week a little bit late after somehow getting sidetracked at Scotch Corner services for 45 minutes (don’t ask).
They were kind enough to bring all manner of presents, including a few essentials for the Orb. My brother handed me a packet of nappies and said, “look at the kid on the front of that.”
Oh, I said, umm what’s going on with his hair? That doesn’t seem natural.
Apparently my nieces had been laughing at this image for a while because of the hairpiece. It clearly doesn’t look right and, like that old picture of George Jones from the office days, the more you look at it the funnier it gets. This then raises the question as to why it looks so wrong? Is it:
The baby didn’t have the “right” hair so they put a wig on them?
Someone in IT added fake hair to the existing picture of the baby to make it look more “appealing”?
The baby isn’t real and AI generated the whole thing, bringing a level of unreal hair not seen since the days of old men on Saturday night TV in the 1970s?
The hair is real but it looks SO real it makes it look unreal?
I’m torn between 1 and 4. I want to believe someone exists with such exquisite hair that it can’t exist and people won’t accept it exists because of that level of perfection.
I know you’re all excited for next week and I could hardly contain myself so I’m writing the post early. Wilmot’s week is dedicated to the adoration, worship and general appreciation of the great Gary Wilmot. It’s a chance to really kick back and enjoy yourself and all of the joy that Wilmot has brought to the world. The best part is that it happens completely at random meaning you have to stay alert (and download the app) to ensure you don’t miss out on any of the celebrations. Sure, it’s next week yet it could also be the week after that, the start of next month or around your birthday. Wilmot’s week takes no prisoners. It’s completely unhinged.
Recently I have been pondering what wor Gaz could do next with his startling career. He’s already an accomplished singer, presenter, actor and entertainer; what’s left? Open a restaurant, one themed around terracotta jug western hoedowns or rats that look like footballers? No, that would be silly. We need something sleek and modern. We need a Gary Wilmot video game.
It can’t be something cheap like a mobile game. It has to go all the way, multi platform and nothing but the best. I want to see Ps5. I want full scale Steam trailers showing all the exquisite gameplay on offer.
I was hoping it’d be a disgustingly violent first person shooter however i was told by his manager that this wasn’t the kind of image they were hoping to portray to the general public. We’ll therefore keep it nice and cosy, set it in a warehouse and have Gary as some kind of, I don’t know, eccentric warehouse manager. He can have a tea cosy on his head instead of a hat. Then when you finish the level he’ll tip his head to one side, whistle and say, “It’s time for a brew!” That’ll make all the grandma’s chuckle with delight.
To make it as accessible as possible it should be a puzzle game. Everyone loves puzzle games, right? The same as everyone loves detective TV programmes set on boats featuring washed-up pop stars? So wor Gaz has to help you sort out items in a warehouse. We’ll get a custom made soundtrack from the Papples and soon we’ll be hoovering up the awards.
It will take some doing, the hours will be long and arduous but stick with me and we’ll really make a difference. Now all that’s left to do is a quick check to make sure nobody else has…
Those of you with long memories will recall the harrowing story I related back in July about clearing the browser cache on my phone and losing my winning streak on a stupid tetris game I play every day. I’d been trying to beat my personal best of 80 and bombed out at 79.
I had to start again at 1, and Wednesday 15 October was the day I would finally reach 80 if all went to plan.
Well, good news: today is Thursday 16 October, and I now have a new personal best.
I’m not going to pretend this is the biggest thing going on in my life at the moment, and it might not even be the biggest thing happening in yours. But it is a bit of good news and we could all do with that. Jolly good.
You know how this works. Someone in your team goes away somewhere nice on holiday, and they bring back some sweets or something for everyone else. Sometimes it’s just a nice bag of fruity chewy things they picked up at the airport, but there are people who take pleasure in bringing back something unusual that divides opinion.
In our team we have a side table where people sometimes put biscuits and other things to share. (We call it the calorie counter.) This week I came in to work after a few days off to discover it had several interesting things on it. But one of the oddities of working in a department where we all do shifts is that different people are in on different days, and by the time I arrived, there was nobody on shift who had any idea where this stuff had come from.
So I was left to examine it and see if I could work out what it all was. Here is what I found.
News just in! Reports are claiming that, after the Chris Marshall / Mecha Godzilla collaboration in August, a new concoction has been sighted in an industrial estate in the South of England.
Some bright spark decided that it was time to splice the Chris DNA with children’s 80s stop motion animated favourite Bertha, resulting in a sight that will either warm your heart or frighten you to within an inch of your life.
The Chris Bertha (or the awkwardly-named Chrertha) was spotted churning out items earlier on this week. The types of items varied greatly from garden gnomes and beach balls to jumping kangaroos and inflatable plastic bears. Once the Chris DNA had properly taken over however it decided to make a hugely illustrated and highly detailed map of the A282 as well as some interesting recipes involving avocados.
“This is the worst news I’ve ever heard,” spat news correspondent Harsh Blenchley, “you don’t see it? You don’t see the monumental disaster on the horizon? Do I need to spell it out to you? Do you even English, my friend?”
After ten minutes of this, she finally explained herself.
“Everyone knows that Bertha is capable of manufacturing anything in the world. She was the original 3D printer. A complete original. That kind of power mixed with the monstrous C-Marshall DNA could easily be used to disastrous effect. If you installed a time machine and a matter transporter into Bertha then she’d be able to go anywhere, at any point in time and make anything she wanted. The world would be on its knees.”
Ms Blenchley could see the big picture even if the rest of us couldn’t.
After the information was reported to the local police, a raid was planned on Tuesday morning. Officers burst into the premises only to find a few empty boxes and a windmill money box.
There were rumours that the C-Marshall strain of DNA was being used in some unscrupulous experiments in Korea and China, although they have remained unsubstantiated until now.
Needless to say, if the Chris Bertha has been moved to a new site, and a time machine and matter transporter been added to it, then we’re all doomed. Stay tuned for more details.
Welcome back to Melocaeruledus corner. This week we take a deep dive into the scarier parts of the Fladger family tree with the Honey Fladger…
Honey Fladger
Scientific Name:Melocaeruledus melliferus (melliferus = “honey-bearing”, fitting its honey badger heritage and predatory, aggressive nature.) Common Names: The Honey Badger,
Habitat: Savannah, scrublands, arid grasslands.
Description: The Honey Fladger combines the white-headed bastardry of the honey badger (Mellivora capensis) with the shiney blue abdomen of a bluebottle fly. Compound eyes lend it a fearsome viso/volto.
Behaviour: Both feared and admired by locals, Its powerful build makes it a fearless hive-raider. Shrugging off bee stings, it consumes the honey, wax, and larvae with equal relish. Whilst it will generally eat anything that annoys it, it has a fondness for snakes, biting them behind the head and dropping them from a great hight onto other unsuspecting Honey Fladgers.
Notes: Its buzzing flight has been likened to the growl of a wolverine caught in a trap.
As we can all tell from my last post, even without the statement at the end, I was, and still am, very tired. What started as a brief joke message to my brother turned into a rambling post on here about all sorts. This was not what I had intended to do. I was going to set some time aside for another Chris open source DNA newsboost post only suddenly it was 11pm before the end of the month and I had to scrabble around for something quicker and easier instead.
Everyone knows that looking after babies is exhausting. That still doesn’t prepare you for how exhausting it actually is. It’s a new level of exhaustion not felt in a very long time; to think I used to get a bit rowdy if I lost as little as half an hour’s sleep on a weekday. Oh, what a fool I was.
The good news is that despite some major changes to preparing baby formula bottles and some minor stuff, a lot of it remains the same and muscle memory is keeping me afloat. I am a happy state of tired, one that means I struggle to remember which way to clean the cheese grater so that I don’t shred the sponge but one that knows it is all worth it because of who it’s all for.
Perhaps with all this weariness we’ll return to 2007 Ian, writing nonsense poems about shoes made of bonfires and random articles about haunted sesame seeds. That all remains to be seen and I apologise in advance if it does happen.
