Friday 2 January 2009

Featuring car wasing, or not and a new film rating system

186 comments
To wash or not to wash, that is the question
I'm a bit concerned about the recent rain that we've had, much more of it and it will ruin my water shortage excuse for not washing the cars. I'll have to fall back on the, "If you leave them long enough, eventually they start to clean themselves" excuse. I've tried driving quickly through local fords and clean looking puddles but that’s just not working. My last hope is smothering the cars with cat food and letting McG at them. If it works, I could start him on two cars a day, one at morning feed and one in the evening. It could become a lucrative little earner for him and as far as I know the first ever "Tongue cleaned car service in the UK"**. If only the program Nationwide was still being broadcast, I'm sure we could have got him a mention. I guess the Shopping Channel could probably get a good 3 hour session out of it. That however is unlikely to yield sales, since I don't know anyone who has not been paralytic before purchasing anything through the Shopping Channel, which would of course leave them in no fit state to drive the car over.

* This doomed to failure, rather like the iCat 2000 Dishwasher. McG had no problem licking the plates clean; getting him to eat the dishwasher tablets beforehand was always a bit problematic.
iCat 2000 Dishwasher developed a number of early problems including, sleeping on the job and a tendency to leave lots of ginger hair on the dishes and plates. Attempts to sell this as a special "Fuzzy Finish" feature failed to impress the buying public and they demanded their money back


Film reviews, a new rating system
We finally got around to seeing "The Da Vinci Code", Mrs B gave it 3 mins before zzzzing out, leaving me to suffer alone. This must be some sort of a record. Normally Mrs B makes it to about half way, even for the worst of films. The advantage of the “Mrs B Snore rating system" (patent pending), is it lets me know if I've made a good film choice, apparently this time I didn't. I guess we won't be going to see the follow up "Da Vinci Code II : I know what you did last supper".
Looks like a three snore rating.......

Garage clear out, a bit like a historical dig, without Tony Robinson
Once you get to the point when the footprints of the cars is the only space available in the garage, it's time to either get a smaller cars (I'm not sure I could face swapping the Mini for a Smart Car) or clear out the garage. Rummaging through stuff that is around 8 years old is quite an eye opener. You could probably get an entire quiz worth out of :-

"what is this for?"

"why did we keep this?"

"Animal, Mineral or Vegetable"

I've now decided to localise the problem and have put lots of little, "looks like they might be useful items" into a tin. This leaves me with the dilemma, do I take the tin straight down to the dump** or bury it in the garden, like a time capsule. Sods law dictates that whenever any of the items contained in the tin would be of use, the tin will be unavailable, only appearing again once, the requirement had gone away – a bit like Hogwarts – Room of Requirments, only in reverse. A final discovery was that McG had been doing some excavations of his own and had evidently hit the jackpot, the large hole in the side of one of the cat feed bags being testament to his success.

** Going to the dump is an interesting experience and could almost become a spectator sport. It has now got so complicated as to which bin your items should go into that the government are thinking of introducing an Open University course in identifying where items should go. There is no point approaching the mini Hitler's in charge of the dump as their sole existence is to prevent anyone from adding an item to the particular bin they are responsible for "No sorry chum, that can can't go in the wood bin, it's only 99% wood try in the 1% unidentified section". When you sit down and think about it, it's nice to know that you are also joining the world of recycling, even if it is unintentional. Half of the stuff you chuck away will be appearing at a car boot sale in the near future, only to be returned to the dump shortly afterwards, when the chump who purchased it, realises it is actually rubbish after all. If this process builds up ahead of steam, within a few generations the UK will have stumbled on the mother of all energy sources, perpetual motion between Home, the dump, Car Boot Sale, new home, the dump, Car Boot Sale ad infinitum. We could also include it in the UK’s Annual Recycling Returns, rocketing us to the top of the World Recycling League......

That’s it for another BlackLOG - historical – if you have enjoyed it please pass it on to anyone you know who might also enjoy it or to anyone you don't particularly like and would like to see suffer. You can also tune into the up to date version BlackLOG.